Mobile ad firm Opera Mediaworks is rebranding as AdColony with effect from January 2017. Its aim is to unify the brand, performance and publishing business under a single name, while continuing its commitment to quality mobile advertising experiences. The company will remain independent, with the corporate entity listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange under Opera ASA.

The other driver behind the rebrand is the recent acquisition of Opera ASA’s namesake consumer browser by a Chinese consortium of companies. As part of the deal, the consortium is retaining the ‘Opera’ name and brand, so this required a shift away from the name ‘Opera Mediaworks’, which is a fully-owned subsidiary of Opera ASA.

“I am excited to unify the advertising business under the AdColony brand globally,” said CEO Will Kassoy. “We are passionate about brand experiences that evoke emotion and drive real outcomes by combining both creativity with the next generation of advertising technologies like data science-driven automation and Artificial Intelligence. We look forward to building the AdColony brand around this positioning and hope to help elevate the state of mobile advertising.”

AdColony is the mobile video ad platform that the parent company Opera ASA acquired in 2014. After the acquisition, AdColony remained an integral part of and major revenue driver for the Opera Mediaworks business. The company said it felt natural to turn to that established name and to continue the momentum and reputation the brand already had in the mobile ecosystem.

While the former AdColony business was mainly associated with mobile video advertising, the new AdColony will encompass all areas of the former Opera Mediaworks and AdColony business, including rich media/display, streaming video, Instant-Play video, and all associated technologies and ad formats across the company’s programmatic marketplace.

In addition to the rebrand, the company has also been recruiting. Recent additions to the EMEA team are Jon Hook (ex-Mediacom and Phunware) as VP of Brand Sales, and Jessica Burr as Marketing Director EMEA. Justin Davis will start in the new year as the new Financial Director for EMEA.

The company will continue to leverage its deep SDK footprint among leading mobile app publishers. These include fast-growing apps from publishers like DraftKings, Musical.ly, Shazam, Wattpad, Wishbone, Zynga and many other companies.

In addition, it will continue to invest in data science and machine learning. One of the key initiatives for the company in 2016 has been to unify all of the mobile advertising technology platforms that have been acquired over the years into one integrated platform. Over the past several months, the company has invested in technology and data scientists to work on this unified platform, called Apollo, which will be launched in phases throughout 2017.