As Editorial Director, 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.
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. […]
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 […]
