As a staff reporter at AdExchanger, Alison covers advertising agencies and the digital audio landscape. Previously a copywriter at MarketSmiths, she has written digital marketing copy and produced campaigns across multiple verticals. Prior to that Alison worked in editorial at award-winning travel journalism site Fathom. She has a B.A. in International Studies and Spanish from the University of Michigan.
It’s been just a year since Spotify entered the podcasting market, and consumption is already growing like gangbusters. Podcast hours streamed on the platform grew 200% year over year, and more than 16% of Spotify monthly active users (MAUs) engage with podcasts, the company said in its Q4 2019 earnings report on Wednesday. Spotify also […]
When the boutique programmatic agency Jellyfish sold a majority $550 million stake last November to French holding company Fimalac, it did so to transform from an agency into a global network. Jellyfish started as a Google Marketing Platform (GMP) reseller and programmatic in-houser. It will make this transition by acquiring specialist companies that can enhance […]
Brands aren’t totally boxed out of a relationship with ad-free Disney Plus. The streaming service, which has been running co-marketing deals with brands like Verizon since its launch in November 2019, is open to similar deals as well as product placement and brand integrations in its original shows, sources tell AdExchanger. A Disney Plus spokesperson […]
Amazon is the ultimate bottom-of-the-funnel play for brands. But the company sees big opportunities to expand into branding. “I don’t think we do a good enough job of allowing brands to have a recreational and ongoing conversation with consumers,” said Colleen Aubrey, VP of performance advertising at Amazon, at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview in New York […]
Where there’s a screen, there’s an opportunity for a programmatic ad. Curb Media Network, the media division of taxi technology provider Curb Mobility, has turned on programmatic access to 1,200 digital screens across its fleet of yellow cabs in New York City. Curb has operated a media network for years in partnership with 15 thousand […]
Generation Z consumes media differently than millennials, but brands don’t always understand that. To help brands better relate to younger audiences, former Wavemaker exec Noah Mallin left a career in agencyland to join Gen Z-focused media company IMGN as its first chief brand strategist, the company said Monday. IMGN owns the social media handle of […]
Corporate siblings WarnerMedia and Xandr are full steam ahead on data-driven TV sales. Just look at this year’s upfront, where the AT&T subsidiaries will go to market together for the first time. The companies have been inching their way toward a joint offering over the past year and a half in an effort to sell […]
Sarah Personette’s career has taken her on a wild tour around the industry. After graduating from Northwestern in 2001, she landed an agency job at Starcom – taking the interview on a whim. She was on an upward trajectory when she left the agency world to join an upstart social media company called Facebook. “My […]
Ampersand, the sales consortium owned by Comcast, Cox and Charter, wants to simplify advanced TV ad buying by pooling the fragmented inventory across networks and cable operators across the United States. So it launched the AND platform Thursday, an interface where ad buyers can buy, plan and measure advanced TV inventory across Ampersand’s 85 million […]
WPP CEO Mark Read will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference in New York on Jan. 28-29, 2020. WPP CEO Mark Read has worked to make the holding company faster, simpler and more collaborative. Since taking on the top role a little over a year ago, Read reshaped the world’s largest holding company, notably folding […]
Ad buyers aren’t thrilled about Google Chrome’s decision to phase out third-party cookies, but they’re thankful it’ll take about two years; Safari and Firefox didn’t extend such a courtesy. During that time, most buyers intend to rebuild their targeting and measurement strategies. But Google’s proposed Privacy Sandbox solution is still too theoretical for there to […]
Dentsu Aegis Network said Tuesday it has acquired E-Nor, a California-based consulting firm that specializes in Google Analytics and is a major reseller and sales and service partner of Google Marketing Platform. E-Nor and its roughly 45 employees will fold into Cardinal Path, the marketing and analytics consulting group Dentsu acquired in 2016. Cardinal Path […]
When it comes to data, IPG CEO Michael Roth has said in the past: “Why buy it when you can rent it?” But that thinking changed last year when Acxiom went up for sale. When IPG bought Acxiom, it was able to build new offerings around first-party data management. In October IPG launched Kinesso, a […]
Measurement has been the bane of the podcast industry’s existence, as advertisers have had to rely on a faulty download metric as the best proxy for a listener hearing their ad. That’s about to change – at least, on Spotify. The audio streaming giant will start dynamically inserting audio ads into podcast streams on its […]
Swapping out ads on linear TV to target audiences just got a bit more real. Project OAR (“Open, Addressable, Ready”), a consortium backed by smart TV maker Vizio, said Monday at CES it has finalized open specifications for dynamic ad insertion on linear TV and integrated with major ad decisioning engines including FreeWheel, Google Ad […]
Last decade saw a spate of data broker acquisitions by agency holding companies. But are these deals too focused on owning data, rather than using it to derive insights? “You have to look at broad groups of data to understand consumption,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital. Rather than purchase a data broker, Omnicom […]
Cadent said it acquired ad tech company 4INFO on Thursday to help buyers to better allocate spend across channels and platforms as TV viewing fragments. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Cadent works with buyers and sellers to execute addressable and data-driven linear TV buys. It will gain access to OTT and CTV inventory […]
The 2010s was a decade of tectonic shifts for the TV industry. Linear TV networks can no longer avoid the digital revolution. As eyeballs shift to streaming platforms and buyers demand more automation and better measurement, new players, like Hulu and Roku, have risen as prime media sellers, while broadcasters evolve their businesses to capture […]
The advertising industry changed tremendously over the last 10 years. That change came from the men and women whose decisions shaped what the industry prioritizes and how it does business. AdExchanger looks back on the past decade of data-driven advertising and highlights the marketers, agency executives, ad tech entrepreneurs and platform leaders whose contributions have […]
It’s almost 2020, and data and technology have revolutionized media. So why has the industry still not been able to crack data-driven creative? After six years at media agencies, Oleg Korenfeld asked himself that same question. In December he left Wavemaker, where he was global chief platforms officer, to join LA-based branding and experiential agency […]
Ten years ago, national TV was a steal. Today, marketers are getting priced out by skyrocketing ad rates, even as audiences decline. Despite ratings falling by double-digits across geos and dayparts, TV networks have maintained flat revenues by raising the cost of their inventory, said James Fennessy, CEO at Standard Media Index (SMI), a data […]
Marketers aren’t switching off of their DMPs – yet. But they’re considering solutions that are less cost-heavy and more integrated with paid media. DMPs from Oracle, Salesforce and Adobe have always been the most-used platforms in previous Advertiser Perceptions reports, and they still are in the research firm’s latest report, released Wednesday. But their favor […]
Data management platforms (DMPs) were once painted as a panacea for all of a marketer’s data needs – from collection, to harmonization to segmentation and syndication. But marketers have since cooled on the technology, concluding that it‘s too disjointed to perform many of the functions promised. Marketers tell AdExchanger they have struggled to achieve ROI, […]
Nick Brien, CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network in the Americas, will leave at the end of the year after 2 1/2 years on the job, the company said Friday. He will be replaced by Jacki Kelley, who joined Dentsu in March as president, chief client officer and CEO of creative in the United States. Kelley […]
The advertising industry has a problem: People don’t want to be interrupted by commercials anymore. Hulu is trying to fix that by offering new ad units that are less disruptive. On Thursday, the streaming service released an advertising experience designed to lighten ad loads for people watching multiple episodes of a show in a row. […]
The programmatic industry is known for its breakthroughs in data and media. But when it comes to creative formats, innovation has fallen short. Programmatic ad units are largely still the same banners and pre-roll videos of 10 years ago, which don’t perform as well as the in-feed native ads consumers see on social. Instagram and […]
Advertising is becoming an intriguing business for smart TV manufacturers, and Vizio became the latest to throw its hat in the ring Tuesday, when it launched an ad sales business that will take advantage of the 13 million smart TVs it has in American homes. “It’s no secret that the connected TV space has been […]
The linear world is going programmatic, and agencies need to start applying audience strategies to their traditional buys. To instill that mindset at Omnicom, agency Hearts & Science said Tuesday it has elevated its Chief Data Officer Megan Pagliuca to chief data and media officer. The title change might seem nominal, but her new purview […]
TV viewership is now decreasing faster than linear TV inventory prices are increasing, according to Magna’s latest forecast. This shift is causing the TV networks’ revenues to slip. Global linear TV ad spend was down 4% year over year to $289 billion in 2019, according to Magna. This year for the first time, TV represented […]
Google is officially getting out of the managed services business in the United States, the company said earlier this month. The company shared the news at its Google Marketing Partners summit, an event that caters to agencies, consultants and other service providers. Google has long offered managed services across Google Display & Video 360, Search […]
