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.
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 […]
Integral Ad Science named Lisa Utzschneider as CEO Wednesday. She will start in January by performing a strategic analysis of the business and creating a growth plan for the verification company. After mulling an IPO, Integral Ad Science went the private equity route this summer when Vista Equity Partners bought a majority stake in the […]
In February, you can watch the Super Bowl on your phone with the Yahoo Sports app. Last year, Verizon purchased the mobile and tablet rights to NFL games for Yahoo Sports. Live NFL coverage attracted 4.3 million people to download the Yahoo Sports app this season, in addition to 1.1 million people who downloaded the […]
AppNexus has been wanting to make its fees transparent, even before it was acquired by AT&T’s ad unit Xandr, but it couldn’t because of how contracts are written and structured. But now, buyers can find out how much of their media budgets went to tech fees when they buy publisher inventory through AppNexus, a level […]
From 7 pm to 7:45 pm on Tuesday, publishers saw mysterious yellow 300×250 ads blanket their sites. Paying CPMs north of $20, the yellow square ad elbowed out other buyers with its big spending. Hourly revenue spiked many times over publishers’ normal averages. Then it disappeared. Turns out, the yellow ad appeared across the United […]
Revcontent named Omar Nicola as its new CEO Wednesday, replacing co-founder John Lemp in the top role. One of his first orders of business has been making further layoffs at a company whose employee count is around 80, down from a reported peak of 150 when it appeared on the Inc. list of fastest-growing companies […]
Over a year before the FBI brought down 3ve’s human creators, the ad industry rolled out ads.txt, an anti-domain spoofing standard that slowly throttled the botnet. 3ve visited spoofed domains and sold fake traffic to publishers and, when it was active, was responsible for 1% to 2% of all bid requests, according to Google product […]
Imagine buying Costco-sized bulk items online. That’s the proposition of ecom startup Boxed. But while competitors like Amazon offer thousands of items associated with a single search, Boxed offers just a handful. As a newcomer, Boxed’s challenge is acquiring more customers while keeping customer acquisition costs in check. So Boxed is doing local, geo-targeted marketing. […]
When people learned in 2014 that ad fraud was a $6.3 billion problem, many asked why no one had been arrested for stealing all that money from brands. Four years later, that day has arrived. “Finally, somebody gets arrested for this,” said Neal Richter, chief architect of Rakuten Marketing Platform. The FBI charged eight people […]
New York Media is putting programmatic front and center. The publication has long serviced programmatic deals yet didn’t tout them in market. But as programmatic becomes the dominant way to transact, New York Media hired Jeremy Fass in July to head its programmatic revenue operation. His mandate? Be proactive about programmatic, not reactive. “Due to […]
Condé Nast will execute its turnaround with a new leader. Its longtime CEO Bob Sauerberg is departing after 18 years with the company, including eight in the top spot. He’s leaving just months after he announced a turnaround plan for the publisher of Vogue, Wired and The New Yorker that would see it diversify away […]
One year ago, Rubicon Project removed buyer fees from its platform, halving its take rate to 12.8%. The gutsy move occurred during a battle over take rates: Competitor AppNexus said its take rate stood at 8.5%, and its CEO called for a price war. Drastically cutting take rates forced Rubicon to use cash reserves to […]
In-market auto is one of the most prized data segments – and it’s notorious for being inaccurate with artificially large scale, which makes it emblematic of the problems with third-party data. First-party in-market auto data, however, is another story. VerticalScope, which operates over 600 niche automobile sites about various car makes and models, knows what […]
Aside from dedicated fans, most people who show up to a concert never hear from the band again. That fleeting relationship poses a challenge for musicians. How can they get people to come to their next concert? Or buy merch? Hurdl is solving that problem with connected LED wristbands, which live event attendees activate using […]
Google Ad Manager is the dominant SSP, according to Advertiser Perceptions’ 2018 Programmatic Intelligence Report. But, the 154 publishers surveyed also valued platforms in areas like proactively shared insights and reporting – categories where Google didn’t perform as well as its competitors. “Google is the clear leader,” said Kevin Mannion, chief strategy officer at Advertiser […]
As anyone who’s ever consulted “Dr. Google” for a medical condition knows, the Internet can be an incredibly helpful place to find health information. But once people find their answer on WebMD, where can they go next? People with long-term medical issues want support from others dealing with their conditions, not just definitions. The Mighty […]
