David Kaplan is a former Video/Publishing Platforms editor for AdExchanger.com. A New York City-based journalist for over 20 years, Kaplan has covered media, advertising and marketing. A former staff reporter at paidContent, Adweek and MediaPost, he has also written for Advertising Age, Broadcasting & Cable, Crain’s New York Business, The New York Post, Newsday and the Boston Globe; he has also covered financial issues for the Bond Buyer and Worth magazine.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
David Kaplan
Articles By David
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Videology Looks To Partners, Not Purchases, For Deeper Mobile Moves
Mobile and video are the fastest growing segments of display – eMarketer has video’s growth rates rising 46.5% for 2012, while it says smartphone based ad spending will jump 180% this year to top $4 billion. And yet, aside from Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Hulu, there are very few sites that can truly make the claim […]
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Super Bowl Ad Viewability: How The Blackout Affected Big Game Ads
The 35-minute power outage at Sunday’s Super Bowl XLVII caused consternation for CBS, the network that broadcast the game. For advertisers, the outcome was mixed, as some lost exposure and at least three fast-acting marketers were able to use Twitter to capture some attention. Looking at it in the context of viewability — which has […]
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LUMA's Terry Kawaja Says Ad Tech Consolidation - Including 'Fails' - Is Here. And It's Good
Terence Kawaja, founder and CEO at LUMA Partners, has surveyed the past few week’s notable deals — demand side platforms MediaMath’s acquisition of Akamai’s Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS) unit (which his firm helped broker); exchange platform AppNexus’ $75 million venture capital funding; and the shuttering of adBrite’s exchange business. And he sees the clear formation […]
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Hoping To Unlock Bigger Budgets, Adap.tv Begins Selling Viewable Impressions For Video Ads
As competition for brand campaign dollars heats up in the video space, Adap.tv has introduced its version of the “viewable impression” for streaming media with the introduction of its Certified Viewability feature, which promises to verify whether a video placement has been seen in real-time and blocks impressions that do not appear to the user. […]
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Facebook's Q4: FBX Drives Impressions Higher, Execs 'Encouraged' By Demand
Facebook made solid progress on generating ad revenue, especially through growing use of its less than five-month-old Facebook Exchange and its aggressive focus on mobile advertising. At the same time, Facebook’s desire to spread itself and its products as widely and quickly as possible, particularly in developing countries, resulted in huge expenses — costs were […]
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AdTheorent: Fix Mobile RTB By Fixing Data Mining First
Mobile ad network AdTheorent has unveiled real-time, predictive modeling software that aims to address the inefficiency inherent in current mobile data mining methods. Called Real Time Learning Machine (RTLM), it can analyze 50,000 mobile bid requests per second. “There is a problem with the way data mining works,” CEO Anthony Iacovone tells AdExchanger. “First, you feed that system […]
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AdBrite Shutters Exchange, Sale Talks Continue For Marketplace And IP Assets
AdBrite has shut down its exchange, and says it is close to selling off its other assets: namely, its B2B Marketplace directory and the intellectual property and engineering operations that power the core exchange product. In essence, this means that adBrite as it has been known — since evolving from an ad network — will […]
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Blackstone’s Allen: Expect More Ad Tech M&A Dealmaking In ‘13 – In Contrast To The Wider Market
Most media industry observers expect to see a another strong year in M&A for the Ad Tech sector. For example, a survey [PDF] of 231 top media/tech executives released last week from media investment bank Jordan, Edmiston Group, Inc. and Econsultancy shows an upward trend in organizations planning an acquisition in the next 12 months, […]
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WPP's Xaxis Sees A Draw For Brand Dollars In Programmatic Audio Ads
Although the major internet ad players – e.g., Pandora, Spotify, Last.fm – all swear by their direct sales, Xaxis, WPP’s audience buying unit, is looking to leverage audio ads as a way to get more brand campaign ad dollars within its programmatic system. “The appeal [of internet radio audio ads] is that we want to […]
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How Orbitz Balances Data Science With 'Judgment Calls'
There’s no dichotomy between “intuition” and “big data” at work in online marketing. But it does feel that way sometimes. For Orbitz, interestingly, judgment calls often come in to play as the company evaluates algorithms from dueling ad platforms that are competing for its budget. “It’s incredibly important to be skeptical about any pitch related […]
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Google's Q4 Shows A 'Happy Holiday Season' For E-Commerce, Ad Exchange
Google’s advertising business was “firing on all cylanders” during Q4 2012, in the words of SVP/Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora, who pointed to healthy growth — even by the search giant’s standards and (some, if not all) analysts’ expectations — during the holiday shopping season. The company had just completed its shift from free product […]
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IgnitionOne’s Margiloff: Google PLAs Are Extending Search Ad Spending, Not Cannibalizing It
Less than six months since Google decided to merge its paid Product Listing Ads and its “free” shopping-related results into a single paid image-ad format, about 35% of commercial searches now show PLAs in the results, up from 29% in Oct, says Jefferies & Co.’s analyst Brian Pitz. As Google Shopping now essentially requires retailers […]
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The Weather Company Goes 'Beyond The Banner' With Mobile Ad Units
Vikram Somaya, GM of The Weather Company‘s marketing insights group, WeatherFX, began his Media6Degree’s AdsCON presentation about the importance of data by reciting a passage from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In a stentorian voice, Somaya read lines about Caesar talking about “threatening clouds” to the attendees seated in a seminar classroom at NYU’s Stern School of […]
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ePrize, In Mobile Acquisition Mode, Buys In-Venue Marketer Mozes
A little more than a year after making its first mobile-centric acquisition, sweepstakes content company ePrize has made its third purchase in the smartphone marketing arena with text marketing specialist Mozes. In an interview, ePrizes CEO Matt Wise told AdExchanger that the company is currently looking at several other potential prospects in the mobile space […]
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IPG Invests In Mobile 'Surprise Rewards' Marketer Kiip
Two years into their existing partnership, ad holding company Interpublic Group is making an unspecified investment in Kiip, a company that promises to connect marketers and consumers through the use of “unexpected” targeted rewards to mobile app users and gamers. Apart from help in continuing to build the San Francisco startup, Kiip co-founder and CEO […]
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'Premium Programmatic' Purveyor Legolas Taps Shaevitz As CEO
In 2013, expect to see more ad tech companies provide some automation of guaranteed sales. Among the entities working on that idea is Legolas Media, which just hired digital sell-side veteran Jonathon Shaevitz as its new CEO. Shaevitz joins Legolas from sell-side pricing and inventory manager Maxifier, where as CEO over the past two years, […]
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Is Over-The-Top Video Ready For Advertising?
Last week’s news out of the Consumer Electronics Show that Time Warner Cable had struck a deal with streaming video delivery device Roku had ad industry attendees wondering whether “over-the-top” TV was near to having an advertising moment. So we put the question to a mix of video ad observers: “Given news such as this […]
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Simulmedia's Morgan: Audience Buying Is Coming To TV, As Budgets Fail To Move Online
After years of U.S. print advertising dollars shifting to online, the expectation has been growing that television, the largest ad category by far, would soon experience a similar siphoning away of budgets in favor of greater digital spending. Dave Morgan, CEO of TV ad targeter Simulmedia, concedes that his belief that TV budgets aren’t shifting […]
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Thrillist Brings In Digital Publishing Vet Anderman To Steer Native Ads, Mobile
Earlier this week, Thrillist Media Group, publisher of a young men’s local lifestyle guide network and e-commerce app, brought in digital ad sales vet Todd Anderman as the company’s president of sales, marketing and operations. Most recently the chief media and revenue officer of mobile ad targeter Jumptap, Anderman spent much of the past decade […]
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Magna's Monahan: When It Comes To Mobile, Programmatic Remains Stymied
Even as mobile real-time bidding gets more attention, the obstacles currently in its path will continue to prove challenging, says Brian Monahan, managing partner of IPG’s Magna Global. The media shop’s research unit just unveiled its twice-annual Media Economy Report, which details the promise and the problems of mobile advertising. As Monahan pointed out in […]
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Meredith's Schimel: Private Exchanges Alone Won't Save Publishers
Among the questions facing publishers last year: (1) What should be done about the rise of audience buying?, and (2) How do we make mobile advertising really pay off? Meredith Corp., the publisher of women’s magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle, has been focused on mobile for years, particularly through the […]
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Quantcast Acquires Ad Effectiveness Analyst MakeGood Software
Although Quantcast has often discouraged observers from attempting to group the analytics provider into the “ad effectiveness” category with comScore, Integral Ad Science (fka “AdSafe”), DoubleVerify and others, its acquisition this morning of MakeGood Software would appear to put the company in closer competition with those parties. In a post on Quantcast’s blog, CEO Konrad […]
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AOL, Yahoo Homepage Ad Quality Rises -- But So Do The Challenges
As AOL and Yahoo struggle to keep pace with display ad gains from Google, Facebook and Amazon, the portals have placed much of their hopes on lucrative brand campaign-friendly homepage ads. Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter has been charting the progress of the portals’ homepage ad quality and quantity, and it looks like Q4 was a […]
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Dynamix Aims To Find The Purpose In Repurposed TV Spots
The word “repurposed” is often used disparagingly when discussing TV commercials being employed for digital video ads. After all, people accessing content on PCs, tablets, smartphones are in a different mindset from when they’re watching TV. Ads need to be “native” to their environments and merely cutting a 30-second spot into a 15-second one suitable […]
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Paywalls Without Cash? Enliken Encourages User Data As Currency
With print revenues falling faster and online ad dollars failing to fill the void, publishers have increasingly turned to paywalls. As a Guardian UK piece noted this week, 11 of the top 20 U.S. newspapers are either currently asking users for cash to access content, or are about to embark on it. Enliken, a company […]
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Mediaocean Preps ‘Prisma’ Display Ad Buying System
It’s been nearly a year since ad sales workflow systems provider Mediaocean was given the regulatory green light to form the merger of Mediabank and Donovan Data Systems. While Mediaocean picked up the mantle of both entities’ attempts to bring online media buying methods to traditional TV, Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise tells AdExchanger that the […]
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Germany’s OOH Specialist Ströer Moves Online With Adscale
While advertising spending was depressed across Europe as a result of the ongoing debt crisis, the resilient German economy represented the best growth aspects for the ads space. And as the sense of doom and gloom ebbs a bit in Europe, there is a sense that real-time bidding, and its promise of efficiency, has received […]
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Maxifier COO Katsur Succeeds Shaevitz As CEO; ‘Forget Big Data, We Want Big Money’
It’s been a little over a year since Anthony Katsur joined sell-side pricing and inventory manager Maxifier as COO from demand side platform MediaMath, and the former DoubleClick executive is moving up to the CEO seat. He replaces Jonathon Shaevitz, who steps down from the post just two years shy of taking it. The move […]
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AdBrite’s Exchange Evolution Riding More Heavily On Video And Mobile
AdBrite morphed into an ad exchange platform four years ago after shifting gears from its ad network beginnings, but the company was never recognized for making the full leap. Back in May, its board decided it was time for a change and brought in former Yahoo/Right Media executive Hardeep Bindra to make the evolution complete. […]
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Hearst CRO Welker Eyes 'Paradigm Shift' For Publishers In Programmatic
In 2012 major publishers’ wariness of programmatic advertising began to thaw. As part of our 2013 predictions series, we asked Kristine Welker, Hearst Digital Media’s Chief Revenue Officer, what she expects from coming next year. In essence, she sees the promise of brand dollars emerging more visibly as publishers help push the boundaries of exchange-based […]