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.
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. […]
Cookies increase ad prices by a factor of two to three, according to the majority of research – a fact that marketing professor Garrett Johnson wants front and center as the industry weighs decisions about the cookie’s future. So he’s taken to Twitter, chiming in on topics like Google’s recent study that showed a 52% […]
Women hold two-thirds of the student loans in the United States, but they are far less likely to refinance those loans to save money. One possible reason is that ads for loan refinancing use “one note” messaging that doesn’t feel inclusive to women, according to CommonBond creative VP Cara Phillips. CommonBond saw an opportunity to […]
A successful article at HuffPost doesn’t have the most traffic – it has the most traffic from loyal readers with the highest engagement time. HuffPost overhauled its audience strategy last year to super-serve its most faithful readers and increase their numbers. The publisher is also diversifying its revenue through subscriptions. In April, it soft-launched a […]
The Washington Post’s former chief revenue officer, Jed Hartman, has landed at Channel Factory, which uses video AI to help brands curate their YouTube buys for better brand safety and contextual relevance. For Hartman – whose departure from the Post was left unexplained – the new role as chief commercial and strategy officer fulfills a […]
Unlike competing browsers like Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome has to strengthen user privacy without undermining online advertising. Chrome walked that razor’s edge when it revealed plans to create a “privacy sandbox” that will increase protections to user privacy without breaking programmatic advertising that funds publisher content. To bolster its position, Google claimed […]
When Remedy Health acquired Vertical Health in April, a key reason was the health site’s expertise in using data and targeting. Remedy Health, which didn’t run programmatic ads before, is now adopting Vertical Health’s in-house data platform for its sites, including HealthCentral and HIV management site TheBody. Vertical Health’s portfolio focuses on information for people […]
NBC News, whose portfolio includes Today.com, CNBC and MSNBC, doubled the clickthrough rate (CTR) on its branded content when it used tech that fine-tuned distribution of the content on its sites. The branded content tech, Polar, automatically tested different pairings of headlines and images, optimizing how it pulls readers into a story, and automating more […]
Digital media brands are course-correcting to focus on profitability – and PopSugar is no exception. The media brand has been profitable for a year by following the playbook of diversifying revenue and improving the margin on existing revenue. Offline, the millennial women-focused publication is cashing in on the generation’s obsession with experiences, throwing a signature […]
Hearst is building a self-serve ad platform so advertisers can overlay their audience data against Hearst’s to reach readers across sites like Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle and Car and Driver. Designed for smaller advertisers, the platform – dubbed Hearst Audience Select – is slated to launch in time for Q4 ad campaigns. Audience Select will also […]
Uncertainty around government regulation or challenges around monitoring user-generated content didn’t slow down Google as its ad revenue hit $32.6 billion in Q2, up 16% YoY. (Its parent company Alphabet’s revenue rose 19% YoY to $38.9 billion in Q2.) YouTube was the No. 2 driver of revenue growth in both Q2 and Q1, CFO Ruth […]
Digitally native companies made nearly $1 billion in commitments during this year’s upfront, making them the biggest advertiser category in NBCUniversal’s $7 billion upfront, the company said during its Q2 earnings Thursday. The digitally native category includes the “FAANG” companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) as well as direct-to-consumer companies like Peloton, NBCU’s CEO Steve […]
There’s yet another content streaming service joining the fray: AT&T TV will enter beta testing in Q3, offering viewers an internet delivered TV option, the company said during its Q2 earnings call today. If AT&T TV’s service takes off, it will open up a new pool of OTT inventory for buyers. IP TV services can […]
Consequence of Sound prides itself on its independent coverage of the music and film industries. But it doesn’t have the mass reach and recognition that easily entices buyers to go direct. On the open marketplace, it kills: Over 1,500 advertisers spend more than $100 per month on the open exchange with Consequence of Sound. As […]
Horizon Media is the first agency to use Nielsen Advanced Audience, a linear TV product designed to make measuring granular audience segments like “new parents” as easy as measuring age and gender with C3 and C7 ratings. Advanced Audience allows agencies to find viewers in narrower segments than age and demographic and do post-campaign measurement. […]
How does a smaller DSP survive, as the largest buying platforms command more of the marketplace? For Dstillery, the answer is to become a data company. Dstillery officially shut down its bidder and stopped operating a DSP on July 1. Its focus now is selling custom audience segments through the buyer’s DSP of choice. Since […]
The Trade Desk and Google are locking horns on pending industry specifications designed to bring transparency to programmatic buying. Why? The Trade Desk, rather than Google, is the one throwing its weight around for a change. As one of the originators of the Open RTB SupplyChain object spec, The Trade Desk has been gunning to […]
Linear TV may provide massive reach, but WD-40 had a particular audience in mind for its most recent campaign: a subset of millennial workers with jobs in hands-on industries. And so WD-40 turned to connected TV, focusing on a branding message celebrating “doers.” Executing its branding campaign programmatically allowed WD-40 to target that high-level message […]
Even though three-quarters of consumers already use a subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service, they are open to adding more – for the right content. Viewers are willing to add an average of 1.6 more SVOD services to their current lineup, according to the 2019 Manatt, Vorhaus Digital Strategy Study. Since Disney, WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal, Apple and Discovery […]
Optimera increases site viewability solely from a publisher’s point of view. The tech optimizes campaigns toward the most viewable placements in real time – key in an era where buyers demand highly viewable ads, but publishers lack the technology to meet these demands in a way that’s sustainable for their businesses. “The market has failed […]
Amazon Publisher Services shot up in the rankings in the 2019 Advertiser Perceptions supply-side platform (SSP) report, emerging as a challenger to Google. The survey evaluated 18 exchanges via a poll of 155 sales and ops staffers from sites with at least 3 million monthly uniques. Amazon’s sell-side ad tech business rose from eighth last […]
