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.
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 […]
More than a year after Meredith said it would sell off Viant, the ad tech company has found its buyer. Viant co-founders Tim and Chris Vanderhook said Monday they’ve bought back the 60% stake they sold to Time Inc. in 2016, before Time Inc. itself was acquired by Meredith. They declined to reveal the deal […]
Google is acquiring Fitbit for $2.1 billion, or $7.35 per share, the companies revealed today. With the purchase, Google gets access to a wearables business that is largely dominated by Apple Watch. Apple, for example, made $2.1 billion from wearables last quarter (a segment that includes both its watch and AirPods). Google will use Fitbit’s […]
Yext is moving into site search, using natural language processing to help brands answer customer questions like “How many calories are in your burger?” or “What are the features of your travel reward card?” Tacking on site search opens up Yext’s tech to a new customer base, including direct-to-consumer and online-only brands, as well as […]
As marketers seek more transparency into their programmatic buys, they’re bypassing their demand-side platforms and going straight to exchanges and publishers to ask for log-level data about the bids they’ve won and lost. More than a dozen of the most hands-on, sophisticated marketers – including P&G, L’Oréal, T-Mobile and Bayer – are leading the charge. […]
Watch a program on Vudu, and you’ll likely only see ads for products you can buy in a Walmart. That’s no accident. The Walmart-owned streaming platform uses the retailer’s purchasing data, which brands can use for targeting. They can also serve dynamic product ads, such as a Coke ad for one family and a Diet […]
Rubicon Project acquired header bidding management and analytics platform RTK.io for $11 million in cash on Monday. The plan is to integrate RTK.io’s tech and analytics functionality into Rubicon Project’s Demand Manager product by the first half of next year. “This will accelerate our vision to be a leader in the Prebid managed service business,” […]
As media properties march to the drumbeat of revenue diversification, many are pursuing affiliate revenue aggressively. Meanwhile, Ziff Media Group has run a thriving affiliate commerce business for years, all the while increasing its level of data-driven sophistication. Ziff Media Group drives $1 billion in last-click attributed revenue a year. In contrast, BuzzFeed’s business totaled […]
Chipotle delivers. Getting customers to switch to online ordering has been a key part of Chipotle’s brand transformation. Digital sales soared 100% YoY for the first half of 2019. That metric, along with an increase in same-store sales, doubled its stock price. Chipotle’s app enables in-store pick-ups or, through a DoorDash partnership, delivery requests. And […]
Tubi is creating a dedicated kids section, Tubi Kids, on Oct. 21 – just weeks before Disney+ launches on Nov. 12. The ad-supported kids content will be COPPA-compliant, meaning that buyers won’t be able to do any kind of behavioral targeting for the ads. Programmatic bid requests will be stripped of any kind of behavioral […]
If TikTok is still proving its value as a marketing platform, despite skyrocketing popularity among Gen Z, it got a huge boost in October when the cosmetics company e.l.f. ran a sponsored hashtag challenge, #eyeslipsface, that amassed 1.6 billion views in just over a week. Two factors led to e.l.f’s success on TikTok: showing up […]
Chief marketing officers are surrounded by disruption. And they’re realizing that the branding skills that got them the top marketing seat aren’t the same skills in data and operations that are going to drive their businesses forward, said Merkle CEO David Williams. “The average CMO is in a tough spot,” he said. “They didn’t grow […]
In the past few weeks, digital media paired off. On Tuesday, Group Nine Media and PopSugar combined, following Vice Media’s acquisition of Refinery29 and Vox Media’s merger with New York Media. “This has been the best month in digital media since maybe the beginning,” said Group Nine Media CEO Ben Lerer. “The deals are great […]
The use of data in creative messaging has been talked about for years. But marketers are finally acting. At the ANA Masters conference in Orlando, Florida, last week, they showed how they create relevant messages and drive growth by using customer data. Marketers want data analysis to be “always-on,” instead of through formal market research […]
This summer, P&G posted the best quarter of sales growth in a decade, and its stock price has nearly doubled since spring 2018. To create that growth, P&G is increasingly grabbing the reins, Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard told attendees at the ANA Masters of Marketing in Orlando, Florida, on Friday. P&G’s progress came after […]
This week, the enterprise tech company SAP ran a native ad on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in the form of a skit, where Kimmel’s assistant Guillermo showed how SAP made his life better. The spot wasn’t an obvious choice for the B2B brand. But Chief Marketing Officer Alicia Tillman made the decision after data showed SAP […]
Hilton wants its guests to book directly, because many of the online travel agencies used by so many customers don’t share guest data until the date of arrival. By then, it’s too late to streamline and personalize the check-in process, said Kasey O’Leary, VP of global marketing for the Hilton portfolio and Hilton Honors. But […]
For many communities, the math doesn’t work anymore for ad-supported local news. Roughly 1,800 local papers closed between 2004 and 2018, replaced by only 400 online-only sites, according to a UNC study. “The news desert issue is real,” said Patch President Warren St. John. For Patch, the dearth of local content presents an opportunity to […]
Vox Media and New York Media are merging to create a portfolio of brands so they can better compete against platforms and build diversified businesses at scale, the companies announced Tuesday. “The conversations we have with marketers every day are about the engagement around our brands, scale and performance,” Vox Media Chief Revenue Officer Ryan […]
Assembled from acquisitions totaling in the multibillions, Oracle Data Cloud (ODC) had become inefficient, too focused on its declining business selling third-party data. Now, the embattled unit is trying to streamline. ODC cut 10% to 15% of its staff Monday, multiple sources told AdExchanger, after which it will focus on contextual data, brand safety and […]
Google’s advertising chief Prabhakar Raghavan is reorganizing Google’s ads business – and adding new heads of measurement and privacy, according to multiple AdExchanger sources. As part of the reorg, he’s re-visualizing the company as four “concentric circles.” The innermost circle is Google’s owned-and-operated properties, including search and YouTube. The next circle outside of that is […]
Microsoft is enabling two types of audience targeting to improve search ad performance, which it built to bring its ad offering to parity with Google Ads. Brands can target search ads based on products the person has viewed; and they can target Microsoft audiences similar to their own customers. Both products are still in open […]
