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.
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 […]
The Washington Post became the latest publisher to develop a self-serve platform to compete with Facebook when it released Zeus Prime on Tuesday. Zeus Prime adds a self-serve buyer interface to Zeus, The Washington Post’s revenue platform. The software-as-a-service platform emphasizes fast ad load times and high viewability. Most recently, it added the cookie-less contextual […]
After Freestar landed atop Inc.’s 2019 list of “Most Successful Companies in America,” co-founder Chris Stark pointed to header bidding as the reason the 45-person company’s growth exploded 36,680% over three years. Freestar solves for the complexity programmatic and header bidding created for publishers. In recent years, publishers managed bids through AdSense, then waterfalls, then […]
Financial Times has started using automation to make selling long-tail inventory more efficient. Automation allows Facebook and Google to capture significant ad revenue from small buyers. But for publishers like the FT, managing those campaigns requires tremendous manpower. Consider that 55% of its global ad campaigns in 2018 had budgets under 10,000 pounds. Salespeople and […]
The data-management platform (DMP) was sold as a tool with the power to turn publisher data into dollars. Vendors wooed publishers into signing multiyear contracts to use the technology. But the expectations didn’t match reality. As those contracts have expired, especially this year, many publishers aren’t renewing them. Just as marketers are moving from the […]
Since Lisa Utzschneider was hired as CEO of Integral Ad Science in January, almost the entire senior leadership team has turned over, a sign of swift change at the Vista Equity Partners-owned ad tech firm. The acquisition closed last July. Eighteen C-suite, SVP and VP-level executives have been hired since the acquisition and Utzschneider’s hiring, […]
Union Bank is a small bank that wanted its new branding campaign to make a big impact. So the West Coast-based regional bank will test new messaging in a single market – San Diego – where it can buy enough advertising to match bigger banks. “The four large banks dwarf everyone else in terms of […]
Goodbye AppNexus SSP, hello Xandr Monetize. One year after its acquisition by AT&T, AppNexus is rebranding its exchange to Xandr Monetize. It’s also adding a slew of new features to support its vision of offering a full programmatic stack for video-heavy publishers. Xandr Monetize is the third Xandr-branded product to launch, after Xandr Community and […]
When Google Ad Manager tested the switch to unified first-price auctions this summer, it saw a handful of ad tech players start to win a greater share of ad impressions. “First-price auctions have created a more competitive market,” director of product management Jason Bigler wrote in a blog post Thursday. DSPs, non-AdWords ad networks and […]
Advertising on news content has become a third rail that many brands won’t touch. Hundreds of brands block words like “Trump,” and others use broad keyword blocks that catch innocent articles in the crossfire. Joy Robins dove into this skittish advertiser environment in March, when she started at The Washington Post as chief revenue officer. […]
