AppNexus Gains Needed Mobile Scale With Millennial Media Exchange Deal

Mobile ad network Millennial Media announced late yesterday afternoon that it has teamed up with the real-time bidding platform provider AppNexus to create a new mobile ad exchange that the companies are calling the Millennial Media Exchange.

Through the partnership, AppNexus’ clients will receive access to Millennial’s sales inventory and its Jumptap buying platform. It is a move that will be “a catalyst” for bringing “programmatic to mobile in a premium and scalable way,” claimed Millennial’s EVP and CMO, Mollie Spilman.

“Mobile has been fast to adopt programmatic but it’s really needed the impetus of our supply and our data being available on an open exchange, like AppNexus, to enable all the buying and selling of mobile inventory that the market has been waiting for,” Spilman said.

The deal will lend AppNexus some much needed scale in the mobile arena.

Until recently, AppNexus’ core business was traditional display advertising. The New York-based company, which has approximately 500 employees and $141 million in venture funding, changed course last year with a statement from AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley that the firm was going “all in” on its mobile strategy. (AdExchanger story)

“We’re proud of the fact that we could make a commitment to mobile … and with this partnership we’re unlocking all the latent demand that our clients have had to move faster with mobile,” O’Kelley said.

Millennial issued an IPO last year and recently acquired the RTB platform Jumptap. The company has approximately $241 million in combined annual revenues and 350 employees.

In unrelated news, AppNexus’ ad servers were temporarily down in Europe and the US today due to a “bug” in its system. The outage, detailed in an AppNexus blog post, occurred at 5:54 pm UTC and lasted approximately two hours in the US, according to O’Kelley.

“We were back up relatively quickly in Europe but another issue caused the transfer process to take longer than it should have in the US,” O’Kelley said. “On one hand it’s flattering that something like this was so quickly noticed, but it’s also worth noting that this is the first outage we’ve had in a long time and we’ll be publishing a blog post outlining what the issue was and everything we’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

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