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.
Xumo – an early streaming platform that offers an ad-supported, linear-like streaming experience with branded channels – isn’t worried about the new competition entering the market. “Streaming is a growth sector,” said CEO Colin Petrie-Norris. “More users are getting familiar with streaming as an option. And in the ad-supported space, the people providing an ad-supported […]
The right focal image, message and even background color can make one advertising creative shine above the rest. To help marketers improve the performance of their creatives, Watson Advertising built Advertising Accelerator, a tech tool that predicts the best ads and quickly tests versions during a campaign. The goal is to apply the same automation […]
AMC Networks – like the TV industry as a whole – is stepping up its efforts to make TV more data-driven. And a large part of that initiative means making its data across all AMC brands – including IFC, BBC America, SundanceTV and We TV – available to advertisers. In late December, it brought on […]
NBCUniversal wants its content to appear wherever viewers want it: places like YouTube, Roku, NBC apps, Snapchat, mobile phones and work computers, in addition to linear streams in their living room. But scheduling ads that will light up across all of these platforms is a highly fragmented, manual process. So NBCUniversal hired former Kargo President […]
Gin is on the upswing. Gin accounts for just a single-digit percentage of US alcohol sales, but new brand entrants and a renewed interest in its bright flavors are making the category grow faster than many other spirits. Bombay Sapphire, as one of the classic gins on the market, is increasing its marketing investment to […]
Change seems constant in the media business. A chain of digital media consolidations in 2019 has created new scaled players: Group Nine Media and PopSugar; Refinery29 and Vice Media; and Vox Media and New York Media. Besides a greatly transformed competitive landscape, 2020 will see publishers wrestling with new challenges. Privacy and regulation, for instance, […]
The advertising industry today is largely the product of tremendous M&A activity. AdExchanger looked at the acquisitions that made the biggest impact in the past decade. Impact can mean many things. Some of these startups flourished under their new owners, showing worth far more than their deal price. Others, purchased during their downfall, reflect the […]
Whenever Google moves, people pay attention. Half of the 10 most-trafficked AdExchanger stories in 2019 feature Google, showing how any change Google makes ripples across the industry. Readers were also intrigued by stories of great success and … the opposite. On the former end of the spectrum was an examination of The Trade Desk’s massive […]
Using advanced TV to get incremental reach is all the rage among advertisers. Dish Media is launching Reach Booster in January of next year. The product uses its addressable TV tech and data so linear TV buyers can drive incremental reach across the Dish and Sling TV footprint. Advertisers can also show additional ads to […]
Running a programmatic exchange requires PubMatic to process around 800 billion bids a day and 80 million bids a second – which generates 100 terabytes of compressed data per day. And this number has only risen as header bidding multiplies the number of daily bid requests. Data analysis in real time instead of a day […]
The music industry is coming to ad tech. Behavioral and affinity data about music artists can create valuable targeting information for the right advertising campaign. Imagine being able to target people who have visited a hip-hop artist’s tour site or watched an artist’s YouTube video. But the giant music labels didn’t package that data for […]
Acquia said Wednesday it has acquired customer data platform AgilOne for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition is Acquia’s third this year and its fifth in two years. The company wants to build a “digital experience platform.” “There are so many siloed marketing technologies today,” Acquia CEO Mike Sullivan said. “Communication across channels is not coordinated, […]
Dish runs a scaled addressable advertising business. But its process to decide whether to run a linear or addressable ad was highly manual. Staff used spreadsheets and spent two to three weeks just to schedule a single week of advertising. And managing yield – like figuring out whether an addressable or demo-based linear ad should […]
CBS joined OpenAP, the companies said Monday. The move comes less than a week after CBS’ merger with OpenAP founding member Viacom closed. With CBS joining, OpenAP’s members together represent the majority of national TV ad spend, as well as 92% of all US audiences watching TV. “We heard from buyers that they wanted to […]
Eyeota co-founder Kristina Prokop is returning to lead the data company as CEO. She replaces Kevin Tan, who led the company as CEO for the company’s first decade. He stepped down for an undisclosed reason, but will remain on the board. “There are different talents and types of leadership needed at different stages of the […]
As it prepares for an IPO, Sprinklr made its 12th acquisition Tuesday with the purchase of Nanigans’ performance advertising business for an undisclosed price. Sprinklr will completely absorb Nanigans into its “front office platform,” and it will no longer be available as stand-alone offering. Beyond paid media, Sprinklr connects mar tech to ad tech with […]
With cookies in decline, Dotdash wants to be the publisher that helps marketers weather the transition. With nearly a dozen media brands that span personal finance, weddings, lifestyle, wellness, beauty and travel, Dotdash prides itself on helping more than 100 million users find answers, yielding an enormous cache of intent data. Since its sites often […]
As digital native companies seek new marketing channels beyond social media, they’re finding success offline – with the very traditional channel of direct mail. Online brands such as Wayfair, HelloFresh, Joybird, DoorDash and Casper, to name just a few, now send out direct mailers. The United States Postal Service is part of this digital transformation. […]
There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to bras. ThirdLove, an upstart challenger to established lingerie brands like Victoria’s Secret, is well aware of that fact, and its merchandise and marketing reflect the ethos of personalization. For instance, it offers half-sizes of its bras and an online custom fit finder. As ThirdLove becomes a more mature, […]
Even with doom-and-gloom headlines, our AdExchanger community has much to be thankful for. In a special Thanksgiving episode of The Big Story, we asked our readers and listeners, “What are you grateful for in ad tech?” As it turns out, many see a world of regulation and cookie pressure from a glass half-full perspective. They […]
Three auction clearinghouses have come to dominate digital advertising: Prebid, Google open bidding (formerly known as exchange bidding) and Amazon Publisher Services’ Transparent Ad Marketplace (TAM). With the rise of header bidding, publishers needed a way to have multiple exchanges bid against each other in real time. Prebid launched in 2015 as an independent and […]
Twelve years after launching Demandbase, CEO and founder Chris Golec will move into a chief strategy officer role. Chief Revenue Officer Gabe Rogol will become CEO and join the board. Rogol joined Demandbase, a B2B account-based marketing vendor, in 2012 to lead its go-to-market sales strategy. He will use his skills in operations, execution and […]
Facebook is allowing advertisers to whitelist content as part of an overall improvement to the brand-safety controls on the platform. Brands can use the controls, still in alpha, to create whitelists of publishers for in-stream video and Facebook Audience Network. “Whitelists have been a request for advertisers for some time,” said Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s VP […]
Up until last year, TripAdvisor primarily sold to travel advertisers and online travel agencies. But that’s changing out of necessity. TripAdvisor’s core hotel ad business has declined as Google encroaches on its hotel research-and-booking revenue with its own planning tools. In TripAdvisor’s most recent earnings report, revenue from hotel ads shrank 14%. So the 20-year-old company is pitching nonendemic […]
Buyers increasingly want transparency into their programmatic buying. But undertaking the project of requesting log-level data from exchanges themselves requires resources many brands don’t have. Lucidity wants to be the tech solution to demystify and audit the programmatic supply chain. Lucidity stitches together information from the buyer’s ad server (where it inserts its own pixel), […]
DoubleVerify purchased Ad-Juster for an undisclosed amount Thursday in an all-cash, all-stock offer. The analytics platform gives publishers a stitched-together view of their programmatic ad performance. “A lot of our work today is with advertisers to maximize their quality and performance,” said DoubleVerify CEO Wayne Gattinella. “Ad-Juster extends our platform to the supply side.” Ad-Juster […]
“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 Sarah Sluis, senior editor at AdExchanger. It’s the first in a series of perspectives from AdExchanger’s editorial team. There’s a question in ad tech that’s been surprisingly difficult to get […]
Rubicon Project missed revenue projections for the quarter as programmatic changes, including the new transparency standards App.ads.txt and sellers.json, affected its topline revenue growth. Rubicon Project’s Q3 revenue grew 27% year over year to $37.6 million. Year to date, its revenues are $107.9 million, which represents 30% growth compared to the same period last year. […]
The New York Times is removing open marketplace programmatic ads from its mobile app starting in January 2020, because their slow loading times detract from the user experience. The decision will result in a single-digit millions loss of revenue. “We believe that this will be more than made up by gains in engagement and a […]
Content is king. And great content gets readers to sign up. The content analytics company Parse.ly has long captivated publishers with its intuitive dashboard to track how articles perform. In October, the 10-year-old company added functionality that tracks conversions. Parse.ly clients can now analyze the type of content people read before they convert. Then they […]
