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.
Verizon’s Visible, a low-cost, digital-only phone carrier, is using direct-to-consumer principles to attract millennials who are leaving a family plan for the first time in their lives. No stores exist. Consumers sign up for Visible by downloading an app. A new SIM card arrives in the mail for the $40-per-month service. Like direct-to-consumer brands, Visible […]
Last June, Well+Good was acquired for $10 million by Leaf Group, which will pay another $9 million if it hits performance targets through 2020. Bootstrapped, profitable and diversified, in terms of its revenue streams, the wellness publisher avoided the pitfalls of raising too much money, going all-in on Facebook or relying on only one source […]
Normally, when Kellogg’s launches a new product, it goes all out with national marketing and big TV budgets. But Kellogg’s broke all its own rules when its 12-person “speed team” created and brought to market two new products in less than a year: Joybol, a protein-packed smoothie bowl, and Happy Inside, a prebiotic and probiotic […]
Six-year-old women’s underwear brand ThirdLove considers data critical to its whole business, not just its marketing plan. The direct-to-consumer company was founded by husband-and-wife team Heidi Zak and David Spector, who both hail from Google’s advertising business. “The biggest thing I learned [at Google] was about testing and optimization,” Zak said. “Even if something didn’t […]
Hearst Magazines named Mike Smith as its first chief data officer Thursday. When Smith joined Hearst in 2013, he introduced programmatic to its sites and oversaw programmatic buying. As chief data officer, Smith will oversee data use in programmatic campaigns, branded content, direct sold campaigns, sales operations and editorial. “When Troy [Young] became president of […]
Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital acquired the programmatic agency MightyHive last December to marry hands-on-keyboard expertise with dynamic creative expertise from MediaMonks. The acquisition kicked off a formal working relationship between S4 CEO Sorrell and MightyHive CEO Pete Kim – who are bonding over their similar Type A personalities. Sorrell’s reputation for all-hours emails and constant […]
The amount of online media with audience data attached is shrinking, thanks to Apple, which now blocks third-party cookies in Safari, and GDPR, which requires user consent to show personalized ads. But when advertising cookies are missing, marketers have limited, costly alternatives. Some demand-side platforms (DSPs) don’t offer any contextual buying. Or buyers must pay […]
Supply-path optimization (SPO) lets buyers find the best way to access the inventory they want. But the next stage of SPO is emerging, where buyers will negotiate with exchanges to create their own low-fee paths to supply. In that spirit, the agency Goodway Group and the exchange PubMatic inked a deal Wednesday where PubMatic will […]
The battle between buying audiences and buying context is over. Glossy, splashy magazine brands know they’ve lost the cheap CPM game to Facebook, Instagram and Google. But they’ve regrouped in recent years, figuring out how to connect with advertisers and consumers and shore up revenue by diversifying away from advertising. At Tuesday’s American Magazine Media […]
Blavity CEO Morgan DeBaun saw a gap in the media market: a lack of content for black millennials like herself. In 2014, she left her tech job to launch Blavity. “We needed a place, a platform and a media brand that could speak to our stories as part of the young, black creative culture,” DeBaun […]
While some of digital media’s biggest stars and flashiest names make big cuts to make their businesses profitable, others are weathering change just fine. The difference? They’ve always focused on sustainable growth and profitability. Venture-backed companies typically made three key mistakes, according to these publishers. First, and most importantly, they grew costs before revenue. Second, […]
Lately, one of the most popular pieces of apparel worn by professional football players and coaches is a t-shirt featuring NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell wearing a clown nose. It’s a blatant sign of disrespect, and a popular way for people to signal their opinion of the unpopular NFL exec, particularly after he makes a controversial […]
BuzzFeed, Verizon Media and Gannett all had layoffs this week, as the media business struggles to find its way in a digital climate. Over 1,000 jobs went away. BuzzFeed laid off 200 people (15% of its staff), Verizon Media laid off 800 people (7% of its staff) and Gannett laid off more than two dozen […]
OpenX signed a five-year deal with Google Cloud Platform worth more than $110 million that will move its infrastructure completely to the cloud. OpenX is transitioning to the cloud within six months, and it expects the transition to be completed by Q2 of 2019. Once complete, OpenX expects its publishers and buyers will see several […]
If you live in the United States, chances are you live in one of Nextdoor’s 190,000 active neighborhoods, which cover 90% of the country. But many in the advertising business haven’t yet worked with Nextdoor, which started selling ads less than two years ago. Leading that advertising push is Lauren Nemeth, a Google, AppNexus and […]
Beeswax raised $15 million in Series B funding which it will use to support connected TV and win marketer clients. As it expands to achieve these initiatives, Beeswax will double its current headcount of 65 by the end of this year. The software-as-a-service DSP last raised funds in 2016. The new round brings total funding […]
After 14 years at Google and DoubleClick, ads vet Jonathan Bellack has joined Alphabet-owned Jigsaw as its first-ever director of product. Google created Jigsaw as a technology incubator with the mission of using technology to make the internet safer. Jigsaw’s projects have protected news organizations from toxic comments, gave readers uncensored access to sites and […]
Overcoming the banality of a standard banner ad in favor of a custom unit requires a lot of work. Buyers need to work with creative tech companies to build the units, and publishers need to adjust their ad setup to support the unusual formats. When header bidding became the norm, it cut off these companies’ […]
In recent years, buyers have flocked to private marketplaces to avoid the fraud, hidden fees and low-quality ads they saw in the open marketplace. Agencies created a network of auction-based private auctions to protect their clients from these threats. Now the trend is reversing. As the open marketplace’s performance and safety has improved, the value […]
Article co-founder and CMO Andy Prochazka will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 23-24, 2019 at the Grand Hyatt New York. Direct-to-consumer furniture startup Article takes data seriously. Founded by four engineers, every team within the Vancouver, Canada-based company, including its marketing team, is built around a measurement culture. “We’ve focused on […]
Piano, whose tech and services gives digital publishers a way to supplement their ad revenue, raised $22 million in Series B funding Thursday to expand its offering and help it buy other companies in the space. “There’s all this ad tech out there, but nothing exists to help publishers treat their traffic as readers and […]
RTL Group is paying up to $33 million for Yospace, a UK-based server-side ad insertion company. The company will operate independently, but work closely with SpotX, which provides video ad serving and advertising demand to video publishers. “This acquisition will go a long way toward solving issues with programmatic and OTT,” said SpotX CEO Mike […]
The company behind a cable channel for babies has built a thriving branded content business on social media. The against-the-grain strategy comes as many digital publishers de-emphasize social media, instead eying video and connected TV as their next big revenue streams. First Media made the switch in 2016, a decade after it was founded as […]
Verizon Media – formerly Oath – said Tuesday it has increased the amount of native Microsoft inventory it can sell to include Xbox and Outlook, and other exclusive placements. Verizon declined to say exactly how much native inventory Microsoft lets it sell. Buyers can access the inventory via iOS or by using Oath Ad Platforms’ […]
Music Audience Exchange (MAX), a service/tech platform that uses data to pair up-and-coming musical artists with brands, reached into the publishing world to hire Michael Provus as its Chief Revenue Officer late last December. Provus previously held the same title at Wenner Media. MAX connects upstart musicians with brands whose customers listen to the artist’s […]
In 2018, digital media startups crashed and burned, unable to sustain their business models amidst changing social media algorithms, fickle readers and advertisers. Facebook’s fickleness sunk LittleThings and Mic, and contributed to layoffs at Upworthy. When the social network stopped reliably sending readers its way, those publishers couldn’t hang on. Mic first saw traffic from […]
This year’s theme was transparency. Marketers wanted transparency so they could make better decisions. Marketers, agencies and DSPs showed increased interest in the programmatic supply chain. They wanted to know the rules of programmatic auctions and the fees involved in advance, not find out hidden practices afterwards. They also wanted to know where to tread […]
The EMX exchange, operated by the agency holding company Engine, is offering buyers the ability to transact on its exchange with a flat, transparent buy-side fee. The sliding scale model will allow clients, agencies and DSPs to pay more or less depending on volume commitments. So a buyer may decide to spend more on the […]
In the past year, advertisers on The New York Times have bought ads with increasingly sophisticated targeting parameters, such as “adventurous” content, stories about to go viral or brand-safety keywords. To make that in-depth content targeting possible, the Times built its own ad tech – Alice, shorthand for ad library service – a year ago. […]
OpenX has laid off 100 staffers, a process that started weeks ago and included a massive round on Tuesday. It will also sunset its ad server by the end of the year. The departing staff includes engineering, product and tech employees, and OpenX will shift those roles to Krakow, Poland, which has strong engineering talent […]
