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.
The French ad-tech company Pubstack said Wednesday it raised $2.3 million in seed funding from two VC firms and a handful of angel investors, including Criteo co-founder Romain Niccoli. Pubstack’s tech is designed to make it easier for publishers to monitor their programmatic partners in real time, and it connects monetization data with what happened […]
Yelp is moving from targeting your local corner restaurant to businesses with hundreds or thousands of locations. Tom Foran, Yelp’s SVP of national sales, is leading this effort. It’s working. National sales grew 22% in the past year. Revenue for its top 100 customers soared 50%. His 250-person team is focused on Yelp’s “multi-location segment” […]
CalMatters reports nonpartisan, in-depth stories about California state politics on a nonprofit budget – and it needed a tech stack to fuel that vision. The site is shifting this week to use a suite of publisher tools bundled together by The News Project. Founded last year, The News Project wants to serve the wave of […]
Facebook is putting out the welcome mat for professional content creators by diversifying the ways they can earn revenue on the platform. Creators can pursue up to four different revenue streams. They can set up subscriber-only paid groups, receive “stars” as tips from fans, rent their audience to their branded content partners and share in […]
The lowest priced ads don’t always deliver the best results – especially for digital branding campaigns – so ad buyers are re-calculating CPM to a quality CPM (qCPM). The qCPM only counts impressions that are viewable, with on-target delivery, optimal frequency and in brand-safe environments. By looking at performance factors beyond cost, ad buyers can […]
Twitch streamers will sling products during two 12-hour streams on July 15 and July 16 to drive Amazon Prime Day sales. The Twitch Presents channel will be taken over by different streaming celebrities selling products ranging from electronics and gaming to kitchenware and kitsch. It’s QVC, but with gamers making the sale. The close alignment […]
If you own a smart TV, chances are its integrated automated content recognition (ACR) technology tracks everything you watch. What started out as a niche technology tracking viewership in high-end smart TVs has spread to the masses: Forty-seven percent of the United States’ 120 million homes own smart TVs, up from 39% a year ago, […]
If you picture the traditional audience for consumer financial services, you likely see a silver-haired man or woman looking to plan for retirement and shore up their financial future. But that mental image overlooks a younger, digital-savvy generation of consumers who aren’t thinking about retirement, and aren’t accustomed to working closely with financial advisers. So […]
Luggage that tracks you – it’s a thing. Eagle Creek’s new luggage line includes a near-field communication (NFC) chip that allows its travelers to keep track of where they go and how many miles they’ve gone with their luggage. In order to take full advantage of the smart luggage, travelers place their phone within a few […]
Serious runners wear Saucony, the Boston-based footwear brand. But there are also many runners who don’t define themselves as hardcore. Rather, they’re attracted to what running enables them to do: Stay fit, enjoy good food or run for a cause. Saucony is tapping into that mentality through its Run for Good campaign, an Instagram-based relay […]
The destructive dreck on social platforms has brought the advertising industry to a breaking point. And so top brands, media agencies, industry associations and the platforms themselves are banding together to form the Global Alliance For Responsible Media. The organization, which launched Tuesday, will focus on making media sustainable and a force for good in […]
Forrester’s 2019 DMP Wave focused on how data-management platforms plan to make their products more privacy-safe in an environment with increased pressure from privacy regulation as well as Apple ITP and Firefox ETP. Because of the amount of change going on in the DMP landscape, the analyst firm gave particular weight to a company’s vision. […]
Insider Inc. will combine with eMarketer next year, with the goal of creating a large, fast-growing research and data firm unified by its focus on digital transformation. Service for existing clients will remain separate for now, but eventually they may gain access to data and research across eMarketer and Business Insider Intelligence. “We think by […]
Simulmedia, one of the OGs of data-driven TV, raised $29 million in Series E funding Wednesday. The funding will go toward research and development as Simulmedia connects to more inventory sources beyond national linear advertising, including local advertising and OTT from authenticated apps from broadcast and cable companies. The cash will also put the profitable […]
Highsnobiety curates and recommends the latest sneakers, streetwear and men’s fashion to its readers. Now David Fischer, the founder and CEO of the 14-year-old media brand, is using that expertise to create its own ecommerce, direct-to-consumer business. Highsnobiety’s first product “drop” in May, a partnership with Prada’s streetwear imprint “Linea Rossa,” sold out of the […]
The former CTO of Disney ABC Television, Michael Napodano, who also spent a decade at NBCUniversal, joined Operative on Monday in the newly created role of Chief Delivery and Information Officer. “Having been on the programming side of the house for so long, I wanted to challenge myself to be a part of a company […]
The New York Post promoted Sean Giancola to publisher and CEO in January after Jesse Angelo left the company. Giancola, who describes his background as “part publishing, part digital,” now oversees a newsroom for the first time. He’s also taking over several existing projects that will launch this year, he said. Revenue diversification is a […]
By the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, NBCUniversal believes it’s “within reason” that all TV will be delivered through an internet connection, said its EVP of strategy and business operations, Krishan Bhatia. “We firmly believe that all content and associated advertising will be distributed over IP [internet protocol], over digital means, whether that’s to […]
The tsunami of data surging into TV introduces a massive amount of complexity and fragmentation into what used to be a simple media buy. “It’s really complex to buy, and that’s spooking a lot of buyers off,” said Tracey Scheppach, who buys addressable connected TV (CTV) with her agency Matter More Media. CTV, which is […]
At any given moment, 1 million people are watching Twitch, tuning in to the half a million people who stream themselves playing video games every day. The audience can be on par with a national cable network, according to a Nielsen study of concurrent viewers conducted in January. Twitch checks three coveted boxes for advertisers: […]
Amazon is primed to splash some color on a new product category: paint. But rather than slap on its own private label, home improvement site The Spruce lent its name and home décor expertise, selecting and naming the 32 colors of paint. Paint manufacturer KILZ produced the line. KILZ and Amazon first approached the digital […]
Digital media companies who bet on social distribution and video have fallen on hard times, but Group Nine Media is angling to be the exception. Group Nine, whose brands include Thrillist, The Dodo, NowThis and Seeker, has developed a holding company model designed to reduce costs by sharing backend resources – while still efficiently reaching […]
Why should celebrities lend their influence to other brands when they can spin up their own? But for entertainers to launch their own direct-to-consumer products, they need help to understand their social fanbases and turn them into paying customers. For instance, when Kate Walsh – star of “Grey’s Anatomy” spinoff “Private Practice” – relaunched her […]
Google Chrome is making it easier for its users to block cookies and harder for ad tech companies to do fingerprinting. But Google’s dominant position in online advertising means even small changes will unleash a cat-and-mouse game with ad tech companies, who may choose to sidestep the new restrictions. There’s also the concern that consumers […]
Publishers want to control their header bidding – especially in light of Google Ad Manager’s changing rules and proprietary header bidding wrappers giving preference to their own demand. To serve this need, Rubicon Project built Demand Manager, tech that sits on top of the open-source wrapper Prebid. In addition to analytics and a rich UI […]
Google Chrome is increasing its privacy controls for users and will scramble efforts by third parties to identify users via fingerprinting, making it the last major browser to strengthen its privacy protections for users. The changes, formally unveiled during the Google I/O event Tuesday, will roll out in coming months. Chrome will make it easier […]
Want to buy the dress a contestant is wearing on “The Voice”? NBCUniversal is creating shoppable ad experiences for linear broadcasts that allow viewers to purchase items featured on a show or commercial. The programmer will take a cut of the sales that result from the integration. The shoppable links can be accessed without leaving […]
OpenX is testing a platform called OpenAudience that lets advertisers buy using its identity graph, which includes access to unique data from its publishers. It plans to makes its identity graph-enabled buying generally available in Q3. This announcement is unusual in that exchanges like OpenX usually do not offer identity graphs that connect audience data […]
Publishers of all sizes are cutting ties with programmatic resellers. Just as buyers are employing supply-path optimization to eliminate exchanges that provide little value, publishers are removing ad tech intermediaries that clutter their setups or harm monetization. By working with fewer partners, publishers are prioritizing control over their ad setup and site experience over the […]
Brands are being tough on platforms, pulling advertising dollars after brand safety fiascoes and thinking critically about appearing adjacent to unpredictable content that can expose them to brand-safety risks. Yet Reddit, which languished with minimal advertising for years in part due to those brand-safety concerns, is thriving. Revenue grew by a factor of three in […]
