Tremor International this morning announced it is rebranding as Nexxen, bringing its portfolio of ad tech businesses including Unruly, Amobee, Tremor Video and Spearad under one brand in the process.
This rebranding will see combined demand-side platforms Amobee and Tremor Video rebranded as Nexxen DSP, while Unruly will become Nexxen SSP, and Spearad will become Nexxen Ad Server. These latter two units will jointly operate under the banner of Nexxen CTRL.
With the exception of Tremor Video, all of these brands have become part of Tremor International via acquisitions over the past few years. And, perhaps because each was well known within its field, they each initially kept their original branding. Now however, the parent company clearly wants to emphasise that these are all different aspects of one unified business. In a statement announcing the change, Nexxen describes itself as “seamlessly [bridging] the buy- and sell-sides through a single, cohesive video- and CTV-focused platform, enriching every stage of the campaign lifecycle with advanced and exclusive data, including automatic content recognition (“ACR”) data”.
The move caps off a long period of transformation for the company, from its early days as a demand-side focus mobile ad tech business, to its current positioning as an end-to-end video and CTV specialist.
“Nexxen embodies our vision for a robust and flexible horizontal platform that can be tailored specifically to meet our partners’ needs by enabling effective video campaigns across all screens, with a specialization in CTV,” said CEO Nexxen Ofer Druker. “This new chapter is grounded in delivering meaningful value, capitalising on the collective strength of our technology, data and services to work in the ways that are most impactful to brands, agencies and publishers. As we look to the future, Nexxen is well-positioned to drive superior outcomes, through advanced audience discovery and planning tools with cross-platform capabilities that ensure incremental reach in converged linear and Connected TV, unique and exclusive data sets including ACR, and powerful, dynamic data-driven creative.”
Name recognition
Nexxen started life as Taptica, a data-focussed mobile advertising platform, but its business has changed significantly over the years via its high-profile acquisitions. Taptica acquired Tremor Video’s demand-side platform for $50 million in 2017. Then in 2019 it bought RhythmOne for $176 million, adding SSP and exchange components to its business. This deal also strengthened Taptica’s connected TV capabilities, mostly due to RhythmOne’s ownership of advanced TV specialist YuMe.
This was followed up by the acquisitions of Unruly from News Corp in 2020 in a deal with around £15 million in stock plus £30 million in guaranteed revenues, then Spearad in 2021 for $14.7 million, and Amobee last year for $239 million. Over these years, and especially after the Amobee acquisition, CTV has become a more and more prominent part of the company’s positioning.
Today’s announcement isn’t the first time the company has rebranded. Taptica International, the old name for the parent company which owned all the various businesses acquired by Taptica, became Tremor International in 2019. That rebrand was intended to signal that video was now the priority across the company, due to Tremor’s stronger associations with video advertising. This new rebrand meanwhile looks designed to better position Nexxen as one end-to-end platform which serves the buy-side and the sell-side.
