The Rubicon Project and Telaria brands are no more. The two exchanges, which merged in December, have picked a new name to go to market with together: Magnite.
“It felt descriptive of the brand mission,” said Magnite CEO Michael Barrett. Meant to evoke magnetism and the “-ite” of a mineral, Magnite will also change its stock ticker name from RUBI to MGNI.
The new name caps off a recent integration between the two companies.
After the merger closed at the beginning of April, the Rubicon Project and Telaria teams were blended into a single group. Layoffs in May – due to COVID-19 and redundancies post-merger – created a combined group of 600. Rubicon and Telaria staff are now working together, both externally and internally.
Magnite originally planned to hold off on integrating all of its teams until the pandemic was over and people could meet new team members in person. But after it became clear that the health crisis would not be a short-term blip, the company accelerated its plans to consolidate the teams, Barrett said, and they’ve been getting to know each other virtually from 600 different locations.
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.
Internally, the duo’s technology teams have been merged and are working together.
For now, the companies still run two sets of programmatic pipes, since they have very little publisher overlap with each other. But that will eventually change. “Going forward, there will be one seat on the exchange, and one pipe into the publishers,” Barrett said.
Other than the departure this month of Mark Zagorski, former CEO of Telaria and president of Rubicon following the acquisition, the senior leadership team hasn’t changed significantly as part of the merger and name change, Barrett said.
Magnite is anticipating a bright future. With supply spanning CTV, display and mobile, it hits all the marks for buyers that are seeking to streamline the number of exchanges they work with.
CTV is also in a growth phase, as increased consumption of connected TV content, combined with the reluctance of some marketers to make long-term decisions about their TV presence, has made for a strong scatter market that benefits the CTV publishers that Magnite works with.
