Artificial Intelligence

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 […]

“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 Orchid Richardson, vice president and managing director of the Data Center of Excellence at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).  Lexus recently released the first ad written by AI – and […]

Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is relatively modest across large enterprises, but marketing and sales organizations are embracing the technology most quickly. Forty-six percent of companies are investing in AI for sales and marketing purposes, and 50% are deploying AI projects for commerce and customer service, according to a report released Thursday by Constellation Research. By […]

AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. This week on the podcast, Katrin Ribant joins us in the studio for a discussion of the ever-more-complicated data landscape. Ribant spent many years at Havas and helped build its Artemis data platform before co-founding Datorama in 2012. “I was always very interested in the data […]

Facebook might be weathering more headwinds than you can shake a stick at right now, but that didn’t stop it from posting gangbuster earnings on Wednesday. Revenue for the quarter clocked in at $11.97 billion, up 49% year over year – beating the Street’s estimate of $11.41 billion. Click here to read the release. Proof […]

Although a handful of advertisers have suspended their Facebook campaigns in the wake of the platform’s ongoing data scandal, most are staying the course. “Both advertisers and developers are very understanding about having some features removed that they were using,” said Mark Rabkin, Facebook’s VP of ads and business platform, who took the reins from […]

Like most publishers, The Associated Press (AP) is evaluating ways it can increase video and article output without straining its staff or resources. A few years ago, the AP began researching ways it could leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve its internal processes. The publisher then formed a cross-functional AI committee to vet […]

Paris-based ecommerce analytics platform ContentSquare has raised a $42 million Series B round from a series of investors including US VC firm Canaan and Highland Europe. ContentSquare previously had raised $20 million, bringing it to a total of $62 million after this round. The company will use the financing to support research and development of […]

TGI Fridays has a growing appetite for artificial intelligence (AI) and personalization. AI tech is a strategic investment area for the casual dining restaurant chain this year, said James Washington, TGIF’s product manager for digital platforms. Top-of-the-agenda use cases include improving the dining experience and enhancing the brand’s cross-channel messaging strategy, both of which hinge […]

The interactive video ad server Innovid has acquired Taykey, a company that uses machine learning to extract contextual information about video, text and images to help inform ad buys. Terms of the deal, announced Thursday, were not disclosed. Innovid, which has 220 employees, will take on half – or about 20 members – of Taykey’s […]

AI-driven marketing automation platform Artsai came out of a two-year-long stealth period on Thursday with plans to help brands cut down on marketing vendor fragmentation hell. Client Pandora has been using Artsai to help its ad partners with dynamic creative optimization and to gather and apply campaign performance data and insights across touch points. Pandora […]