News Corp supposedly mulls sale of Unruly 4 years after acquisition

News Corporation (News Corp), an American multinational media organisation owned by Rupert Murdoch, is mulling the sale of adtech platform Unruly, according to British news organisation Sky News.

Quoting its sources, Sky News said News Corp has tapped bankers to supervise an auction of the adtech platform after it received "a number of unsolicited approaches" concerning a potential takeover. The news comes four years after News Corp purchased Unruly for about US$176 million, with Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of news UK at News Corp overseeing Unruly. Unruly declined to comment on Marketing's queries. Marketing has reached out to News Corp for comment.

Last month, Unruly partnered with UK digital marketplace The Ozone Project to allow demand partners of its ad exchange UnrulyX to buy outstream placements via header bidding supported by The Ozone Project’s server-side wrapper. According to Unruly, the partnership avoids the "historic complexity" of delivering outstream video through header bidding and provides an effective, transparent and compliant solution for publishers.

In July this year, Unruly also launched Social Display, a new ad format that allows brands to repurpose and distribute social creative across its global network of premium publishers. Delivered in partnership with ad platform Polar, Unruly’s new ad format uses Polar’s Format Management Platform to allow brands to amplify their social media activity by placing social posts within publisher content.

In Asia, Unruly  partnered with publishers across Indonesia and Philippines to create a premium publisher marketplace for outstream video ad inventory. Both marketplaces are available via UnrulyX, which looks to allow brands to collectively buy desktop and mobile outstream video inventory across all top tier publishers in each market. The service also looks to guarantee premium environments for advertisers, with a potential audience of 55m million unique users. The marketplace aims to meet the increasing demands of the ad industry for high quality outstream video ad formats on trusted, brand safe sites.  Meanwhile in 2018, the company also promoted Vijay Kunduri to managing director of Asia.

On the global management side, Unruly saw Norm Johnston, former chief chief digital officer of GroupM’s Mindshare and global CEO of Mindshare FAST, being named CEO last year. He replaced former CEO and co-founder Sarah Wood who stepped into a new advisory role on the Unruly Board together with co-founders Scott Button and Matt Cooke.

(Photo courtesy: Unruly's Facebook page)