Rubicon Project Unveils 49bc, A New Innovation for Direct Order Automation

Rubicon Project (NYSE: RUBI), which operates one of the industry’s largest independent real-time trading platforms for the buying and selling of advertising, has unveiled 49bc, a new direct order automation platform. 49bc is now available in private beta, starting with mobile advertising. 49bc, which will be showcased this week at Internet Week New York, will provide buyers and sellers with one seamless interface that brings packaging, discovery, negotiation, execution and insights into a single unified platform.

“Despite all of the innovation that has taken place within advertising, we are still managing most of our direct guaranteed buys manually,” says Megan Pagliuca, General Manager and Vice President of Digital Media at Merkle. “With the launch of 49bc, we will be able to automate the guaranteed direct buying process as well as enhance our media planning process with the discovery capability. I look forward to seeing how 49bc streamlines the process end-to-end from campaign creation to ad delivery to actionable insights.”

“Rubicon Project gets strong scores for its ability to facilitate alternative buying methods such as private exchange and programmatic premium¹,” wrote Susan Bidel, Analyst at Forrester Research in a recent report. “A buyer we spoke to said it best: ‘The biggest thing for me is how do I automate my buys to create the optimized mix of spend across channels?’ And another echoed the sentiment: ‘If I had my way, I’d have everything in a platform and look at it all in the same way. There’s a huge benefit to being able to look at it all.’… Just the task of manually processing direct orders takes hours and hours of time. Automating those kinds of imperative but not skill-dependent tasks will give salespeople more time to handle the high-touch relationship-building, which is not only what they’re best at, but also what drives the most revenue².”

49bc will accommodate automated guaranteed orders from initiation to execution, allowing publishers and application developers to provide access to their inventory within controlled environments, and streamlining the processes required for buyers to deploy advertising campaigns. The innovative user interface will introduce the following key capabilities and functionalities:

• Packaging. Sellers will be able to list premium guaranteed inventory packages, remain in control of all their business rules, and respond to RFPs.
• Discovery. Buyers will then be able to search, follow and find with ease and accuracy publisher and application inventory packages by platform, format, placement and audience.
• Negotiation. Buyers and sellers will be able to negotiate pricing, volume and targeting within the 49bc interface while reducing reliance upon phone, email and spreadsheets inherent in today’s fragmented traditional media buying and selling process.
• Execution. Creatives, tags, tracking and reporting functionality will be automated via the user interface, enabling seamless deployment of individual or groups of campaigns.
• Insights. Full reporting functionality will be built into the platform to enable actual insights for both buyers and sellers.

“Buyers and sellers of advertising have largely relied on manual processes to manage premium direct orders,” said Josh Wexler, Head of Buyer Cloud at Rubicon Project. “With 49bc we will be seeking to replace those disparate and cumbersome systems with a single platform which moves the industry closer to our vision of automating the buying and selling of advertising.”

49bc is currently available in private beta for mobile inventory. Rubicon Project will be presenting 49bc during Internet Week New York activities. See here for a full list of events and activities.

About Rubicon Project

Rubicon Project pioneered advertising automation and its technology platform is used by hundreds of the world’s premium publishers and applications to connect with more than 100,000 brands globally since inception. A company driven by innovation, Rubicon Project has engineered the Advertising Automation Cloud, one of the largest real-time cloud and Big Data computing systems, processing trillions of transactions within milliseconds each month. According to comScore April 2014, Rubicon Project reaches 97 percent of U.S. Internet users per month.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, Rubicon Project has offices worldwide. Learn more at RubiconProject.com. Twitter: @RubiconProject.

¹ Forrester Research, Inc., The Forrester Wave™: Sell-Side Platforms And Exchanges For Publishers, Q2 2014.

² Selling Mobile: It’s About The Industry, Not Just The Inventory, an April 2013 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Rubicon Project.