Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce and media company, is bringing together its huge portfolio of technology and media assets into one portal so that advertisers have one go-to destination to engage consumers.

Called Rakuten Advertising, the portal effectively unifies the company’s global network of consumer media properties which until now had separate setups.

It pools Rakuten Marketing’s extensive affiliate network, which operates in more than 200 countries and regions around the world, programmatic retargeting and prospecting technology with consumer insights from Rakuten Intelligence.

And it means that advertisers will be able to use one platform to buy media across a range of channels, including Rakuten TV, the Viber messaging app and the Viki video-streaming service that, although headquartered in California, specialises in Asian content.

“Through the unification of Rakuten’s performance and data businesses and our new collaboration with our media properties, advertisers and agencies can now go to one place to access a rich combination of audiences, media, content networks and consumer insights,” said Nick Stamos, CEO of Rakuten Advertising.

In addition to adopting a similar tech infrastructure, Rakuten’s media properties will move to having a single sales force, AdExchanger reported after speaking with Tony Zito, Rakuten’s head of global advertising business.

He said the company’s aim is to “bring together our advertising assets into a portfolio and enable advertisers to leverage the uniqueness of the media inventory and the strength of the tech we’ve built over the year”.

He added that the company has built a proprietary header bidding wrapper for desktop and mobile ad inventory – with video to follow soon – and that it will deploy an exchange, rather than a digital signal processor (DSP), across its media properties later this year.

By using an exchange rather than a DSP, it means advertisers can still use their own DSPs but still make use of Rakuten’s unique data, AdExchanger explained.

“Our strategy is to work with the agency’s existing partners as much as possible,” Zito said. “We don’t want to introduce a fourth or fifth tech that the media buyers need to leverage. We want to make it easier for them to access inventory.”

Sourced from Rakuten, AdExchanger; additional content by WARC staff