As Executive Editor, Sarah oversees AdExchanger’s news and feature coverage and event content. Sarah has written extensively about publishers, sell-side technology and Google. Understanding and explaining the business implications of technically complex topics is her forte. Over her years at AdExchanger, she’s documented the rise and maturity of programmatic tech, as data-driven advertising has spread far and wide in its marketing applications.
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 […]
PubMatic, in its first earnings call since going public, reported Q4 revenue of $56.2 million, a 64% increase from the year before. The company was also profitable, with a 72% gross margin. The exchange’s stock rose 10% in after-hours trading. Despite the pandemic, PubMatic grew revenue 31% for the full year, totaling $148.7 million. That […]
Despite the pandemic, The Trade Desk’s year over year Q4 growth accelerated in 2020, increasing revenue 48% to $320 million. In Q4 2019, the demand-side platform’s revenue grew 35%. In 2020, marketers using the Trade Desk’s sent $4.2 billion in ad spend through the demand-side platform. Spurred by the pandemic, they doubled the amount they […]
Amazon hired Google’s former group product manager Sam Cox and Amobee’s former chief product officer Jamie Fellows to supercharge the growth of its demand-side platform. Cox and Fellows will lead a DSP product team that employs a few hundred people, in an organization headed by Matt Battles, VP of multichannel advertising. Amazon confirmed the hires […]
Goodway Group’s performance soared after it fed log-level data from PubMatic’s exchange into its DSP algorithm. By connecting to the supply-side platform, the agency’s algorithm could analyze more granular data, like why a client lost an ad auction and the price of the winning bid. And when it won an auction, the exchange shared information […]
The insurance market is highly competitive, with big marketing budgets and highly recognizable mascots – like the Geico gecko and Progressive’s Flo. The direct-to-consumer insurance company Lemonade (which went public in July) started four years ago in New York City offering renters’ insurance – the type of $60 per year policies the big guys didn’t […]
Viant’s stock rose 90%, from $25 to $47 per share, after its debut on the NASDAQ stock exchange Wednesday. Investors on Viant’s roadshow “clearly understood Viant’s people-based approach, and how it’s built for cookie and device identifiers going away,” said CEO and co-founder Tim Vanderhook to AdExchanger. At the time, the stock was up to […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. The proliferation of paywalls to access content could be viewed as a bad thing as publishers compete for eyeballs. In fact, perhaps the opposite is true. Media publications are collectively training consumers to pay for the value they derive from […]
Contextual targeting online dates back more than a decade. But the technique is having a renaissance as marketers test out strategies that work in a cookie-free world. In contextual targeting, a machine scans page content and places a digital ad relevant to that context. Natural language processing allows contextual tech providers to understand nuances of […]
Marketers looking for their customers in contextually relevant environments will be able to do so via a new partnership between Media.net and LiveRamp. Media.net is connecting its contextually-focused exchange to LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution. The combo enables private marketplace buys that have been curated to include both a marketer’s own customers and the contexts they […]
Tweets about politics during the US presidential election drove monetizable daily active use of the platform up 27% year over year during Q4, to 192 million. Revenue grew in lockstep with that use, rising 28% to $1.3 billion during the same time period. Advertising grew not just because of increased use, however, but due to […]
District M and Sharethrough will merge to form a single exchange covering native, display, mobile, instream and video. Their combined scale serves a dual purpose. First, it puts them in a better position with buyers, who are working with fewer, but larger exchanges. Second, the two companies will double their revenue, putting them in a […]
When Rubicon Project and Telaria merged just over a year ago, it seemed like the display advertising-dominant company was making its TV play. But in the year since, Magnite’s stock price soared, going up 600% in a single year. Then, RTL Group put SpotX up for sale. So Magnite CEO Michael Barrett decided to make […]
Digital ads that use The New York Times’ first-party data accounted more than 20% of the Times’ core ad revenue in Q4 of 2020. The year before, revenue from ads with first-party data totaled just 7%. Overall, digital ad revenue fell 2% from the year before, to $90.1 million. Q4 revenue overall rose .2% to […]
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. Ad tech veteran Ari Paparo’s Twitter account is a must-follow for thousands in ad tech. But the weight behind his words […]
Over the past year, Publicis-owned Epsilon has been developing a system called Pub Link, designed to buy ads using a publisher’s authenticated users instead of third-party cookies. Epsilon claims its early results are sending more revenue to test publishers. This setup requires publishers add an Epsilon tag to their site or create a server-side link […]
Jeff Bezos is leaving Amazon in Q3 after a record 2021. He will move into a more strategic, executive chairman role. Amazon Web Services head Andy Jassy will assume the role of CEO. Jassy joined as a marketing manager (hey, AdExchanger readers!) in 1997 before rising to head up Amazon Web Services. There’s been speculation […]
Walmart is building infrastructure to support its fast-growing retail media business. After more than a year of testing, it settled on a custom-built version of the Trade Desk DSP. AdExchanger first reported last January that Walmart was testing two rival DSPs, the Trade Desk and Xandr. Walmart’s DSP is a separate, walled-off version of the […]
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. Axios published its first article in January 2017, the same month Trump took office. Now Axios CEO and co-founder Jim VandeHei […]
After Microsoft determined that using the Verizon Media supply-side platform (SSP) for its display inventory increased CPMs in September, it officially switched – the companies said Thursday – making Verizon Media its primary SSP for MSN and Outlook inventory across nine markets, including the United States. The switch validates the work Verizon Media has done […]
In December 2020, Get Maine Lobster sold more lobsters in three weeks than it did in the entirety of 2019. And all this year, it’s often selling more lobster than Maine fisherman can catch. The decade-old lobster-by-mail business experienced hockey-stick growth because CEO Mark Murrell took a big risk last March. As millions of Americans […]
Google Ad Manager remains on the top perch across almost every category in the latest Advertiser Perceptions report. Though the pandemic transformed the buy side of the advertising business, giving Amazon Publisher Services a huge boost, the sell side saw more of the same. Publishers leaned into the partners they already used and were comfortable […]
SHE Media is seeing an uptick in programmatic buyers interested in showing their ads in places with niche appeal. Instead of showing ads on health-related content, they’re contextually targeting articles about colds and flus, seasonal allergies or diabetes. But the infrastructure to set up these deals has traditionally been lacking. “That data is passed through […]
Meredith introduced its Data Studio Monday, a platform built out of its extensive first-party data set to help brands better understand their consumers both on and off Meredith’s properties. Data Studio is a way for Meredith to diversify its revenue away from advertising and monetize its massive first-party data set. And it is also available […]
ViacomCBS’ advertising business fell 27% to $1.9 billion in the second quarter, as marketers pulled back during the coronavirus pandemic and golf programming was postponed. “We believe Q2 was the bottom [for advertising],” President and CEO Bob Bakish said. After bottoming in April, each month in the quarter showed sequential improvement. The scatter market held […]
You & Mr Jones said Thursday it has acquired influencer marketing agency Collectively in a quest to create one of the top five global, scaled influencer marketing companies. You & Mr Jones snapped up San Francisco-based Collectively for an undisclosed amount. Collectively will be combined with theAmplify, the 25-person, LA-based influencer marketing firm You & […]
The pandemic has made The New York Times even less reliant on advertising than it was before. The New York Times added a record 669,000 digital subscriptions in the second quarter as people sought news about the coronavirus pandemic and followed coverage of the protests after the killing of George Floyd. The 8.4% increase in […]
Disney’s Q3 revenue plummeted 42% to $11.8 billion, as the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc across its lines of business. Promising increases in its paid streaming subscriptions were far outweighed by the closure (and gradual reopening) of its parks (85% decrease) and movie theaters (65% decrease). Disney lost $3 billion in revenue directly due to the […]
Google’s new VP and GM of ads, Jerry Dischler, sees the big picture of Google’s advertising business, from top-of-funnel video ads on YouTube, mid-funnel display ads served through DV360 and Google Ad Manager, and Google search and shopping ads. The future of automated advertising, top to bottom, is changing in two critical ways. First, machine […]
In-housing programmatic has gone from a nascent trend to the norm as brands seek more control over their first-party data. Sixty-nine percent of brands have either partially or completely moved programmatic buying of display, video and/or CTV in house, according to a 2020 survey conducted by the IAB and Accenture Interactive across the US, European […]
