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West LA-based AdColony announced its $350 million sale to Oslo, Norway-based Opera Software today. The deal is “100 percent strategic” and could turn out to be LA’s largest adtech deal to date, AdColony’s VP of Marketing Molly Moriarty said.
“Opera is acquiring AdColony to expand the offerings of its mobile advertising subsidiary, Opera Mediaworks, extending its rich media capabilities and to add world-class video advertising capabilities. Video is now the fastest growing mobile ad medium,” Moriarty said. “The combined platforms will deliver best-in-class mobile video advertising to publishers and advertisers with a reach of more 700 million consumers globally.”
AdColony will keep its brand, remain an independent entity and will continue developing mobile video ad products like their soon-to-be released native in-feed video product Instant-Feed: “The product delivers beautiful HD video from the world’s top brands right into an app’s content feed or social feed. Right now the only similar solution in the marketplace is Facebook's auto-play in-feed video, but we're opening up our solution to the entire app ecosystem.”
These intuitive products weren’t always AdColony’s bread and butter though: at first the company was a mobile app publisher. And they were a successful one at that, launching 15 of the first 200 games ever in Apple’s App Store.
“The team sought to monetize the apps through advertising, but they were less than impressed with the poor and solutions available at the time. Rather than accept the status quo, the team created their own proprietary ad technology to power mobile video ads that would deliver brands’ content with crisp picture and no annoying buffering.”
Today, AdColony is currently working with big brands like Nike, ABC/Disney and A&E Networks and also over 70 percent of the grossing publishers in the App Store. In Opera’s wings now, the company will scale more quickly: “We wanted to align ourselves with a partner who has largely complementary assets, who shares our vision for improving the mobile advertising ecosystem and who can help us realize our vision for AdColony even faster. We’re happy to say that we found that partner in Opera.”
