Artificial Intelligence

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

Erik Huberman, CEO and founder of marketing consultancy Hawke Media, has some pretty strong – if not outright harsh – words for most media agencies out there: “They’re full of [expletive].” Before founding the Los Angeles-based company in 2014, Huberman launched and sold two commerce companies – Swag of the Month and Ellie – and […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Video Killed The TV Star Comcast’s and Google’s earnings calls last week mark two converging trends in brand advertising and the decline of linear TV. NBC is haggling with advertisers of the Olympics because ratings are down – 42% down – at the halfway […]

“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 by Sarah Rose, SVP International Digital Operations, Data & Platform Ops at IPG’s Kinesso. Artificial intelligence is a heavy and complex topic with tons of deep ethical complications, confusing applications and unknown […]

Direct-to-consumer advertisers pumping tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars into their Facebook ads each month know the power of a good creative message. The best ad creatives drive ROAS (return on ad spend) that can be orders of magnitude higher than a failed message. But how can busy, short-staffed marketing departments test new creative […]

Ad-Lib.io, a company founded by a group of former Google execs in 2017 and which offers creative workflow tools, has clinched an additional $6 million in Series A financing. The latest round brings its total funding to $12 million in less than two years and will be used to accelerate the growth of the London-based […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Taking A Hit The ongoing pandemic is still throwing IPG for a loop as the holdco rethinks its structure for the year ahead. IPG reported net sales of $8 billion in 2020, a 6.5% decrease compared with the previous year, The Wall Street Journal […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. The rapid shift to streaming TV last year significantly disrupted the advertising industry, and was nothing short of transformational amidst the pandemic, social unrest and a divisive presidential election. But despite its vast potential as an emerging advertising platform for brands and marketers, streaming ad […]

Industry Preview is a special, limited-run audio series featuring interviews with key leaders in marketing, media and technology who share their predictions and key priorities for 2021. This podcast is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising.  Brands have long been sold the vision that artificial intelligence will one day supercharge their marketing plans, but results have been […]

Industry Preview is a special, limited-run audio series, featuring interviews with key leaders in marketing, media and technology who share their predictions and key priorities for 2021.  This podcast is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising. The term “artificial intelligence” gets tossed around to loosely describe everything from dynamic creative optimization and automated media planning to […]

Ever since MeritDirect partnered with private equity firm Mountaingate Capital in 2019, it’s aggressively expanded its data and service offerings in the B2B space. In November, the Rye Brooke, NY-based company purchased 180byTwo – terms were undisclosed – marking its second acquisition deal this year; it bought Compass Marketing Solutions in January. “Putting these companies […]

IBM has been banging the drum for years about the role artificial intelligence can play to support everything from cancer treatment to retail personalization. More recently, though, IBM has started to prioritize practical advertising applications of its cognitive computing system, Watson. Last month, IBM brought its AI to ad tech through partnerships with Xandr, Magnite, […]

This SSP is going IPO. PubMatic is gearing up for a proposed $75 million initial public offering after filing an S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. The company, founded in 2006, is one of the ad tech old guard and planning to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global […]

Google is revamping Google Analytics for a world in which privacy plays center stage and identifiers are exiting stage left. The new version of Google Analytics, released on Wednesday, was in beta for more than a year, and will now be the default experience for all users. The updated product includes privacy controls to help […]

When COVID-19 hit, the Google Ads team changed its product road map to meet evolving needs, particularly those of small businesses. And now some of those products are starting to hit the market, including a new trend discovery tool and new buying objectives. “We took a step back and asked ourselves how we could change […]

Oracle is sprucing up its customer data platform, CX Unity, with a little machine learning. The platform will now support real-time behavioral data collection and personalization capabilities through Infinity, Oracle’s digital streaming technology. Infinity captures web event, app and point-of-sale data to help brands build realistic representations of the customer journey. That previously required repeated […]

How do you target people without third-party cookies or device IDs? One way is to use the weather correlated with aggregated online and offline shopping behavior. IBM Watson Advertising released a tool on Monday that expands its weather targeting capabilities by using artificial intelligence to analyze the relationship between weather data from The Weather Company, […]

In February 2021, Facebook will start limiting how many ads a page can run at any given time. Facebook is making the announcement now so that developers have more than enough time to prepare for the change, said Graham Mudd, Facebook’s VP of product marketing for ads. The change will roll out between February and […]

“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 Shiv Gupta, founder at U of Digital. Ad tech is full of BS. Why is that? Because when companies create confusion about their products, to make themselves sound more advanced than […]

Lomit Patel, VP of growth at IMVU, a 3D avatar-based social networking universe, was already planning for an economic downturn in 2017. Growth marketing, he said, is as much about expansion as it is about mitigating risk. “I never only think about the moment, I think 12 to 18 months out,” said Patel, who joined […]

Customer data platform Audiens closed an $8 million strategic investment from South Korean technology company NHN on Tuesday. What was it like to complete the company’s first big funding round during a global pandemic? “Nerve wracking,” joked Jonathan Brech, who was elevated from chief commercial officer to CEO of Audiens as part of the funding […]

This is the third in AdExchanger’s “Meet the CDPs” series. Read previous interviews with mParticle, Acquia-owned AgilOne, Segment, ActionIQ, Lytics, Bluecore, Microsoft, Tealium, Optimove, Adobe, Treasure Data and BlueConic. Amperity is more than happy to explain to clients and prospects what its technology isn’t designed for. Candor helps win deals, said CEO Kabir Shahani, who co-founded the […]

Big tech is all in on differential privacy. It’s a foundational concept within Google’s Privacy Sandbox; Apple applies it to the study of diagnostic device, health and web browsing data; and, just last week, Facebook used differential privacy to protect a trove of data it made available to researchers analyzing the effect of sharing misinformation […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Do Not Merge A group of antitrust economists filed comments on the new DOJ/FTC draft guidelines for vertical mergers, calling the new draft “excessively permissive” for large companies. Historically, antitrust cases focus on horizontal acquisitions, when a company buys a direct competitor. But old […]

Facebook seems to exist within two alternate realities: The one in which it’s battered almost daily by a relentlessly negative news cycle, and the one in which advertisers, particularly performance marketers, never seem to put away their checkbooks. That second reality could be under threat. Facebook has been sounding the warning on privacy-related “ad targeting […]

The TDB company that was formed when IBM sold the bulk of its Watson Marketing portfolio to private equity firm Centerbridge in April finally has a name: Acoustic. Acoustic is starting out with a large stable of clients – around 3,500 – inherited from IBM, and a headcount of 1,100. It’s also hiring, with a particular focus […]

Salesforce and Adobe have lately rushed into the customer data platform category. But independent CDPs aren’t standing still. Amperity, a machine learning-focused CDP, lately updated its platform with new AI capabilities that can combine disparate consumer data into unified profiles, said Chris Jones, SVP of product management, who joined Amperity from Microsoft last year. Additionally, […]

Large marketers are constantly running scores of experiments on their media investments. That can make optimization tricky, said Sadie Daryan, eBay’s global head of display and app marketing. And so eBay has been playing around with a tool from marketing intelligence startup Admetrics, released Tuesday, that uses AI to automatically run thousands of concurrent tests […]

Machine learning is becoming central to user acquisition and app advertising at Google. On Wednesday, Google introduced five game developer-focused ads products, four of which are powered by some form of machine learning. The first new release, called pre-registration ads, for example, allows developers to reach Android users across the Play store, YouTube, search and […]

Paris-based analytics platform Contentsquare said Monday that it’s raised a $60 million Series C just one year after announcing its $42 million Series B. The fresh round, led by French private equity firm Eurazeo, brings the company’s total funding to $120 million since 2016. This raise, like the last, is going toward research and development […]