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.
David Kaplan
Articles By David
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Quote: AOL On The 'Premium' Video Conundrum
“I hear people say I can buy premium video content wherever I want. Then at the other end, I hear people say there’s not enough. And they say that they can’t even buy data on top of it, because the minute you apply data to premium, the cake becomes smaller and smaller. This is why […]
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Social Gamer Spil Games Close To Automating All Ad Sales
Last October, European social gamer Spil Games began shifting away from direct sales to completely programmatic by automating ad buys across its 46 local gaming sites network. The company is attempting to grow its business in the rest of Europe, Russia and Asia as well as the US, claiming an average active user base of […]
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Condé Nast Prepares First 'Private Deals' In Programmatic
Condé Nast enjoyed a 3.3% growth in ad pages last quarter, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. While modest, this was the company’s highest Q1 ad page gain – typically a weak ad quarter following the heavy holiday spending period – in five years. Condé Nast Chief Revenue Officer Lou Cona and VP of Corporate Partnerships Josh […]
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Its Back Against The Wall, Foursquare Prepares To Package Its Data
After Foursquare and its CEO Dennis Crowley struggled for several months to cobble together this week’s whopping $41 million funding round, the social check-in service is still getting heat over whether it will be able to draw revenue and maintain its high $800 million valuation. While emails to Foursquare went unanswered about how it might […]
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As AOL's Brody Resigns, Will Yahoo Build Ad Tech 'Dream Team'?
On paper, the combination of Henrique de Castro, Yahoo’s chief operating officer, Brian Silver, the former Travel Ad Network CEO who became Yahoo’s VP of ad platforms over a year ago, and AOL Networks CEO Ned Brody — who just resigned from that post — as head of ad sales for Yahoo North America, sounds perfect. […]
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Casale Finds Browsers' 'Do Not Track' Reduced Cookie Values
As Mozilla’s Firefox joins Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in rejecting third party cookies by default, it’s very likely that winning bid prices for real-time bidding will continue a decline Casale Media began noticing in the second half of last year. According to Casale Media‘s quarterly index, there appeared to be a small drop in the percentage […]
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Flurry Opens Mobile RTB Exchange, Though True Gains Appear Years Away
Mobile app analytics provider Flurry has been preparing for a world where mobile is the main nexus for marketing and e-commerce. And while mobile ad spend generally lags way behind consumer usage, the company believes that dynamic will change relatively quickly and that its Flurry Marketplace, the name of its mobile RTB system, will help […]
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AOL Unveils Its Supply-Side Platform
For the past year, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has emphasized the company’s position as a programmatic player, discussing the importance of its “tech stack” and building up its year-old demand-side platform AdLearn. The company hopes to complete the circle around its automated ad services with the launch of its long-promised supply side platform, dubbed simply […]
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Media Shop Anxieties? Centro Says Better Workflow Is The Cure
“Workflow” is not the sexiest of topics, even in the realm of digital advertising. But as the process of buying, planning and tracking digital ad buys gets more complex, both agencies and software companies are taking a more serious look at what can and should be automated. Several months ago, Mediaocean, which was the product […]
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Bezos Leads Business Insider's Latest Round - But The Pressure's On PubMatic
Business Insider, the chief digital tabloid with its screaming headlines, bold commentary and incessant slideshows, attracts a lot of pageviews, controversy and ad spending. But the mix has left it grasping for profitability. Now, with Jeff Bezos’ venture capital group leading a $5 million funding round — bringing the total raised to $18.3 million over […]
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Chinese-Focused Luxury Shopping Recommender Bomoda Turns Inward To US
E-Commerce has entered the mainstream in the U.S. and Europe, but China is where the growth really is. As eMarketer predicted earlier this year, the Asia-Pacific region will surpass North America to become the world’s number one market for business-to-consumer e-commerce sales with an annual gain of 30% to over $433 billion. And that is […]
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With 'CableFX,' The Weather Company Pushes Into Addressable TV
The Weather Company, owner of The Weather Channel and its digital extensions, unveiled a plan to bring more addressability to its TV advertising. Dubbed “CableFX,” the new offering from the company’s WeatherFX Division brings existing “big data” to its local and regional TV targeting system. The idea is to more closely bridge TWC’s TV, web, […]
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Facebook Adds Adaptly To Strategic PMD Program
Adaptly, a company that aims to assist brands in increasing and understanding their “engagement” across social media, may now have greater ability to help its clients: The company is the 13th to be awarded Facebook’s Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer title for the social net’s exchange. For Adaptly, being given the keys to the Facebook Exchange is […]
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Examiner.com Shifts Away From Local In Favor 'Topics'
Like a lot of content aggregators, Examiner.com saw its traffic rise to new heights by focusing on search results, then saw the multitudes evaporate when Google changed its algorithm two years ago. Since then, the company has been trying to shift away from the hyperlocal model it had when it launched in 2008, and develop […]
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Gradient X Targeting Mobile Beyond The Cookie
In spite of privacy challenges around the use of cookies in a mobile environment, smartphone and tablet activity is apparently spurring more mobile real-time bidding (RTB) and the use of programmatic tools to conduct business between agencies, publishers and developers. Earlier this year, for example, Adfonic claimed that mobile CTRs and eCPMs were much higher […]
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Gannett Sharpens Digital Ad Position Says CDO Payne
Earlier this month, Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, hosted a “digital upfront” designed to showcase the McLean, Va. media company’s value across the web and mobile. After years of struggle, Gannett has recently begun to see strength in its traditional TV ad sales and newspaper circulation revenues, which gained 46 percent and 24 percent, […]
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Buzzmedia Becomes SpinMedia, With Plans To Balance Native Ads And Programmatic
Six months ago, when Steve Hansen was named CEO of blog network Buzzmedia, he realized that he shared a problem with the company’s readers and advertisers: He had no idea what the company’s identity amounted to. This week, as Buzzmedia (not to be confused with BuzzFeed) rebrands as SpinMedia, after one of its newer properties, […]
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On First Day Of Trading, Marin CEO Says Growth Will Come From Search And Social
Ad management services provider Marin Software became the latest private tech company to go public, and it’s first day of trading on Friday was indisputably positive for executives behind the decision. Now, of course, comes the hard part: getting to profitability and managing expectations along the way. In a conversation with AdExchanger a few hours […]
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Quantcast Stretches Into App Analytics Amid European Expansion
As often happens with emerging channels, advertising dollars are still way behind when it comes to matching the time spent on smartphones and tablets. One barrier to greater spending is the lack of measurement of both the mobile web and app activity, but online analytics provider Quantcast is trying to tie usage across devices together […]
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Google Continues AdMeld, Wildfire Integrations, Aiming Higher For Brand Dollars
Google’s is taking its time adding features from supply side platform AdMeld, acquired nearly two years ago, to its DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Doing so is an ongoing process, Neal Mohan, VP for display advertising products, told AdExchanger in a discussion of Google’s attempts to broaden its appeal to brand-name publishers and big-spending marketers. This week, the company […]
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ShareThis Acquires Socialize To Close The Revenue Loop Around Mobile And Social
Social data analytics provider ShareThis has raised a $23 million third round and has wasted no time spending a chunk of that cash by purchasing Socialize. Socialize creates tools for app developers who want additional social functions attached to their works. The point of the deal, details of which were undisclosed, is to give ShareThis […]
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Time Inc. Keeps Spinning, CRO Caine Departs, Helped Establish Publisher's Programmatic Plans
Even as its parent Time Warner works on spinning off Time Inc. into its own separately traded entity, the company has been pursuing a more aggressive approach to programmatic ad sales the past few months — albeit quietly. But it will have to go forward without two champions of that process. Earlier today, Chief Revenue […]
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Operative Shifts Focus To Automating Direct Sales, Not Direct Response
Back in December, Operative founder Lorne Brown reclaimed the CEO role at online ad sales software management company. He replaced Mike Leo, tapped for the post back in 2004. The New York company is working on serving the largely untapped mid-market and smaller publishers and while looking to sharpen its position as an alternative to […]
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GroupM's Norman To NY Times: So, You're In The Ad Tech Business Now?
The old thinking: social media channels like Facebook and Twitter will be the death knell of traditional publishers. The new thinking: they need each other desperately. And just maybe, they can actually generate a worthwhile amount of ad dollars and audience engagement through mutual benefit. That was the consensus at the opening panel of the […]
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Media Agency Chiefs Spar Over Transparency And 'Transparency' At 4A's
The growth of online media has upended the way media is bought and sold, and the traditional ad agency model is under greater pressure than ever before. On one side of the office are established account planners and media buyers; on the other side sits the trading desk. A group of media agency heads kicked […]
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Oreo's 'Overnight Success' In Social Media Was 100 Years In The Making
Oreo’s humorous tweet referring the temporary power outage at the Super Dome in New Orleans that halted the Super Bowl action between the ultimately victorious Baltimore Ravens over the San Francisco 49ners was hailed as the marketing play of the game. Oreo’s message that “you can still dunk in the dark” caught fire on Twitter, […]
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Will The Agency Business Survive? Look To 'Flying Cockroaches' As The Model
If you’re attending an ad industry conference, it’s a safe bet you’re going to hear a lot of cheerleadering and hyperbole about how great things are. And while there are any number of ardent defenders for the ad agency model out there, few could muster a level of encouragement as spirited as the one laid […]
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Blog Network Evolve Media 'Doubles Down' On Direct Sales
Lifestyle blog network and ad rep firm operator Evolve Media is working on what executives say is a balanced approach to digital sales, albeit one that will continue to tilt more toward direct selling over programmatic methods for at least the next few years. Unlike other digital publishing and ad services rivals, such as Federated […]
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DG Groups All Products Into Ad Management Or Video/TV Solutions
Digital ad management provider DG is pouring the disparate technologies and products it has bought and built over the last few years into a single receptacle called “VideoFusion.” While having a clearer marketing message is the over-arching reason for the “brand unification,” the company also wants to emphasize its proposition to be the connective tissue […]
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Content Recommenders Combine, As Outbrain Buys Visual Revenue
While much of the focus on data has been on the way marketers and ad agencies employ it, there are a few companies who work primarily with the editorial side on how best to target their content (and the advertising that supports it) to readers. That space is shrinking a bit today, as content discovery […]