Month: November 2015

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here. Sizmek Points To PointRoll PointRoll is like a little hot potato getting tossed from owner to owner. Its latest handler: ad tech company Sizmek for the modest sum of $20 million. Read Ad Age’s story. PointRoll focuses on rich media technologies and was purchased […]

Following Adblock Plus’ (ABP) peace talk with numerous ad industry executives last week, the company revealed Thursday morning the first steps toward establishing an independent committee to oversee its Acceptable Ads initiative – which whitelists publishers that abide by ABP’s conditions. Those first steps are more goals than reality at the moment and reflect the […]

The prospect of a viewable CPM (vCPM) standard for digital media buying had publishers running scared a year ago. Now, many are embracing the pricing model, but transacting this way is not without its hurdles. Publishers not only need to defend the value of their inventory to buyers when 20 to 50% of the ads […]

Merkle has China on the mind. The CRM and performance marketing agency revealed Thursday it had entered into a reseller agreement with dominant Chinese search engine Baidu. Although the deal is not necessarily exclusive, it is the first of its kind for Baidu with a US partner agency. As a result of the deal, Merkle […]

Acxiom’s data onboarder LiveRamp hopes to solve the thorny problem of identity – thorny because consumers have thousands of different identifiers. LiveRamp – which Acxiom now refers to as its Connectivity unit, but we’ll refer to as LiveRamp for the purpose of simplicity – has a solution to accomplish that using deterministic identifiers. On Thursday, it announced a partnership […]

A truck manufacturer recently discovered it had an untapped market: women in the Midwest who loved to drive and own trucks. The source of that data wasn’t a focus group but rather Facebook topic data, a PII-free way to deliver what people are talking about on Facebook to the brands that care about it. An […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Mayur Gupta, senior vice president and head of digital at Healthgrades.   It’s staggering to see the pace at which digital technology is changing the traditional and highly regulated world […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here. A Gentler SSP The Wall Street Journal’s Mike Shields profiles publisher ad ops vendor Media Operative, and finds the company has made inroads with a new wave of programmatic-averse publishers by helping them mediate between sales channels. Its new customers include Vice Media, Vox […]

German entertainment media network RTL Group has led a $15 million Series A investment in VideoAmp, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based startup focused on helping buyers plan, purchase and measure unduplicated audiences across mobile, over-the-top TV, video on demand and so on. Other investors include Anthem Venture Partners, Simon Equity Partners and Third Wave Capital. Prior to […]

Health care and pharma brands spend north of $3 billion each year on TV ads, according to Kantar Media, but oftentimes the trade-off is the associated waste that results from mass reach. Although these advertisers have been comparatively slow to adopt data-driven digital tactics, more are investing. EMarketer estimates the sector will spend $1.8 billion […]

Since the beginning of the year, the Financial Times has been selling time-based ads, where the advertiser pays only for ads that have spent five seconds in view. It charges based on cost per hour (CPH). The Times decided to charge for an ad after five seconds because data from its viewability provider, Chartbeat, showed […]

App marketing vendors are starting to talk about omnichannel. That includes Swrve, the marketing automation company which announced Wednesday that it had acquired adaptiv.io, a smaller data automation player. The move is aimed at helping brands “orchestrate user experiences across traditional channels and mobile channels,” said Swrve CEO Christopher Dean. That makes sense since no […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Stephanie Russell, vice president of enterprise solutions at Merkle.  Data-driven marketers now have the ability to target individual people – not just cookies – in so many types of media, […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Chris Cummings, CEO of Curiosity Media. Do you know what ads are running your website? Which brands? What campaigns? Which creatives? If you are like most publishers, you don’t. And if you use programmatic […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here. URLs vs. SDKs People talk about apps making the web obsolete, but Flipkart, the Indian ecommerce giant, has partnered with Google to create a site that steals utility from apps (i.e., it can send push notifications, read info while the user is offline, access […]

Attracting mobile users is pricy. Attracting the right mobile users is even pricier. Cost per install in September was $1.53 on iOS and $1.88 on Android, a 24% and 87% YoY increase, respectively, according to the most recent data from Fiksu. The cost to acquire a loyal user, defined as someone who opens an app […]

Adobe rolled out the Audience Marketplace data exchange on Tuesday, featuring a data cooperative (which Adobe first revealed to prospective partners last summer) and a data partner network. Both are powered by Adobe’s data management platform, Audience Manager. The co-op aspect is designed to let companies pool their first-party data sets. The data partner network […]

Some corners of the ad and marketing tech industries wonder if the data management platform (DMP) is on the verge of becoming a commodity. But a Forrester Wave report on the technologies noted points of differentiation among DMPs’ abilities to handle social information, ingest data from channels usually associated with marketing tech, such as email […]

Judging from last week’s news, it’s tempting to say GroupM has got the programmatic religion. But that might be selling the holding company short. WPP Group’s media-buying arm, which controls $106 billion in global ad spending, last week promoted Xaxis CEO Brian Lesser to a big new job running its North America business. His elevation […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Ephraim (Jeff) Bander, president and chief revenue officer at Sticky. Two-thirds of of publishers, regardless of size, believe that real-time data is important to their efforts, according to a recent […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here. Brands Turn On The Tube Video DSP TubeMogul grew its revenue by 70% in Q3 to $46.5 million. Total ad spend increased 65% to $103.4 million, as the company signed preferred video platform partnerships with brands like L’Oréal USA and Dannon. TubeMogul also teamed […]

Interactive video ad server Innovid has rolled out a programmatic creative tool designed to let agencies and advertisers personalize video messages across devices. This capability is driven, in part, by Innovid’s experience tackling different ad-serving requirements through a series of connected TV partnerships. Innovid entered an audience solutions agreement with Roku in the summer, which […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Jim Caruso, senior vice president of product and client strategy at Varick Media Management. The digital advertising industry has a history of concerns around viewability, brand safety and nonhuman traffic, […]

Why did Time Inc. decide to partner with Etermax, the Buenos Aires-based game studio responsible for the hugely popular app Trivia Crack? a) as a native play b) as a form of content discovery c) to encourage mobile engagement d) all of the above The answer: d. “We’re quickly evolving from being a print company […]

The Canadian publisher coalition CPAX officially added four new publishers (Metroland Media, Winnipeg Free Press, St. Joseph Media and Blue Ant Media) on Monday, bringing the publisher total to 18 and expanding CPAX’s presence on the West Coast. Impression volume has also doubled since Index Exchange helped relaunch it last year: One billion impressions flowed […]

Pubs and brands have complained about programmatic inventory on open exchanges for years, but a renewed focus on inventory quality is gaining traction. AppNexus has long positioned itself as the platform for ad networks, but it reversed its policy in recent weeks by removing ad networks that don’t provide direct publisher or seller relationships. Shortly […]

While the rise of subscription video services won’t lure all consumers away from ad-supported offerings, it represents a disruption to current business models – partially driven by ad blocking and consumer demand for better experiences. “If you think about all of the content we consume that is supported by an advertising model, if a consumer […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here. Video Leaderboard Snapchat logs 6 billion video views per day, tripling activity on the app since May, Tim Bradshaw reports for the Financial Times, citing sources at the company. That’s not too far behind Facebook’s 8 billion and YouTube’s murkier “billions” of daily views. […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Richard Eisert, partner at Davis & Gilbert. Ad-blocking software has long been a concern of agencies, marketers and publishers, but recent developments have pushed the issue to the forefront. Now […]