Some of the headlines that announced News Corp’s acquisition of Unruly focused on the large amount of money that changed hands.

• The Guardian reported, “News Corp acquires ad platform Unruly Media for £58m.”
• Marketing Land reported, “News Corp To Buy Video Ad Tech Platform Unruly For Reported $90 Million.”
• The Telegraph reported, “News Corp completes £114m acquisition of Tech City darling Unruly.”
• The New York Times reported, “News Corporation to Buy Unruly for Up to $176 Million.”
• The Australian Financial Review reported, “News Corp bets on video advertising with $246m Unruly acquisition.”

So, no matter which headline you read, the acquisition of Unruly by News Corp involved a ton of money. And you can account for the variations in the reported amounts either by using a currency conversion calculator, or by realizing that some headline writers emphasized what the initial deal was worth in cash, while others emphasized what the deal was worth if certain performance conditions are met.

However, this acquisition impacts far more people than just Unruly’s founders and investors. I believe this deal represents a seismic shift in social video advertising that will impact most of the marketers that read The SEM Post.

Now, I’ve been following Unruly for a long time. No, I didn’t witness the company’s birth back in 2006. But, I did visit Unruly in 2008 when they were still located in their small, original office in the Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, East London. I mentioned them in the first edition of my book, YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day, which was published in August 2009.

What caught my attention was Unruly’s Viral Video Chart, which tracked and ranked the most shared videos on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. And I bought into their argument that ranking videos by shares rather than views was a far more accurate reflection of what content actually engaged people. This dataset of 2 trillion video views has become the world’s biggest database of video sharing activity and has been described by will.i.am as “the Billboard 100 of its generation.”

Then, Unruly went beyond tracking and ranking the most shared videos and started using all of this historical sharing behavior to predict the potential for video ads to go viral across all digital touch points. They collaborated with leading academics from around the globe including scholars at Harvard Business School, the University of Cambridge, Stanford University and The Centre for Digital Video Intelligence to help advertisers inform their video marketing strategies. And they opened Social Video Labs to help brands make their video content contagious.

Oh, Unruly also developed a suite of advertising products over the past several years that now includes:

• ShareRank – proprietary technology that is able to predict the virality of videos across social and digital media. ShareRank can also inform the changes that need to be made to video content in order to improve the number of times a video is viewed, liked and shared.
• In-Feed advertising – a mobile-first, video ad format that dynamically adapts to the unique look and feel of news feed formats. Leveraging Unruly’s ViewPlay technology, the ad plays as soon as the unit is in view on the page.
• In-Page advertising – video advertising that appears as video player units within the body of article pages, across desktop and mobile.
• Skippable In-Stream Advertising – offering programmatic targeting and prominent branding within the player.

Unruly’s video distribution platform has already attracted top tier advertisers, including such brands as adidas, Dove, T-Mobile, Evian and Renault. And in the coming months, News Corp business units will begin to offer Unruly products to their advertising and agency partners. This will mean a significant increase in premium video and mobile inventory, a stronger content marketing offering and, ultimately, improved returns for News Corp’s advertisers.

That’s why this acquisition is bigger than a breadbox, as my mother use to say.

I conducted an email interview with Sarah Wood, the co-CEO as well as co-founder of Unruly. Here are my questions and her answers:

Greg Jarboe: So, what are the implications for marketers and advertisers?

Sarah Wood: This deal brings together the scale and experience of a trusted media authority with the innovation and agility of a scale-up. It also brings together world-class content with cutting edge technology.

Unruly fuses data + tech to deliver video ads people want to watch, not skip.  We test content and collect data to target the audiences most likely to enjoy the content, on their preferred web environments and devices.

Our predictive technology, Unruly ShareRank, helps advertisers predict the virality of a video and has always set us apart from the competition. And just this year, we launch Unruly Custom Audiences, which allows us to identify and reach the subset of a brand’s target audience most likely to have an emotional connection to an ad – proven to lead to increased sales, higher purchase intent, greater attention and more earned media.

Above else, we’re extremely innovative: We were the first to track video sharing across the Social Web, the first to predict video virality, the first to launch emotional ad targeting, and the first to launch a media exchange for guaranteed viewable video impressions sold via RTB.

And now with through our partnership with News Corp, we’re able to bring our advertisers unique access to one of the largest premium media portfolios in the world – at a time when premium video inventory is scarcer than ever before and demand massively outstrips supply.

Greg Jarboe: Any insights on how this will impact your mission to deliver the most awesome social video campaigns on the planet?

Sarah Wood: Delivering the most awesome social video campaigns has and will always be our mission. That’s not going to change!

Like Unruly, News Corp already invests in the latest data and targeting to make sure advertisers can optimise their digital presence on News Corp properties. And they’re committed to doing much more, building out native video formats that work for their readers and their advertisers, which is exactly why they are making acquisitions like Unruly.

The team at News Corp have long been committed to video content, they recognize that video advertising is the future and we look forward to working together to evolve and develop a best-in-class set of native video ad solutions.

We have unique access to premium media through the News Corp properties and will have additional investment to accelerate our product roadmap. This means we’ll be able to launch more formats and more features to continue to deliver the most awesome social video campaigns!

Greg Jarboe: And any hints at what might be unveiled in the near future, say, in New York?

Sarah Wood: One of the things that made this deal attractive was that News has a very strong track record of turbo boosting companies they have acquired while also allowing them to maintain their values and autonomy. Both teams are passionate and full of purpose – we’re looking forward to working together and learning from each other!