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.
The global digital advertising market grew 21% to $88 billion in 2017, according to the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report released Thursday and conducted by PwC. But because Facebook and Google account for 90% of that growth, according to Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser, others shouldn’t benchmark their own growth rates against the industry average. […]
Advertisers want everything at scale: a niche audience, a brand-safe environment, and beautiful, engaging ads. Atlantic-owned publication Quartz, Vox Media and NBCUniversal’s ad marketplace Concert are partnering to add scale to their respective ad offerings. With the partnership, advertisers can buy in a single deal across Quartz and business-minded publications at Vox Media and NBCUniversal: […]
Google on Tuesday revealed two products at Google I/O designed to drive app downloads. The first is the ability to show app content in an ad. The second, for game developers, is called Google Play Instant and gives consumers the ability to try the game in an ad unit before downloading it. Read the blog […]
As the value of long-tail ad inventory supply decreases, Turner wants to be there to grab the budgets of brands moving toward safer environments. “The murkiness of the long tail in terms of brand safety, along with Safari 11 killing cookies after 24 hours, is going to force a contraction of money that’s spent on […]
The magazine industry is consolidating in the face of multiple challenges. Rather than the newsstand, competition is coming from social platforms. Marketers want the performance advertising sold by key digital players. And as print circulation declines, magazines struggle to maintain the steady revenue from their direct-to-consumer subscription businesses. The CEOs and presidents of Condé Nast, […]
The current crop of forced mobile redirect ads tell users they’ve just won a $1,000 Amazon gift card or an Apple iPhoneX. People in ad tech have come to view them in the same way they see blizzards: They’re a hassle and unavoidable in certain climates, including programmatic advertising. “This comes up every year – […]
Alphabet posted revenues of $32.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2017, up 24% compared to the same period last year. The earnings showed a spike in traffic acquisition costs [TAC] as Google paid more to publishers in its Google Network Members’ properties revenue segment. The segment also includes revenue from Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager, […]
Meredith closed its acquisition of Time Inc. Wednesday to create a media company with 174 million digital US unique visitors – not far behind Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. Meredith will triple its digital revenue by acquiring Time Inc., with projected digital revenue this year of $700 million. Digital will contribute 30% to overall […]
Last year, Group Nine Media, a holding company that owns publications including NowThis and Thrillist, created 23 360-degree videos on Facebook for the VR headset Samsung Gear 360, racking up 161 million views in five months. It was the most popular brand campaign on Facebook in 2017. But will Group Nine be able to replicate […]
Dentsu Aegis Network has spent the past year furiously integrating with publishers so advertisers can target consumers using PII-based identifiers. These identifiers let Dentsu clients target more precisely, consolidate reach and frequency management around a single ID and optimize marketing spend. Advertisers get the benefits of walled gardens without the wall. The program, known as […]
As the value of publisher data surges, Adam Harris, VP of data products at Hearst Magazines Digital Media, is tasked with maximizing its opportunities. When Harris joined in May, he looked at how Hearst data can be used to create experiences that drive sales, which performance-focused advertisers demand from their digital media. The work builds […]
Conde Nast wants to quickly build up its data science practice, so it acquired Lighthouse Datalab on Monday. In so doing, it added three people to its data science team who will enhance the machine-learning and AI capabilities of Spire, its data platform. Lighthouse Datalab founder Sriram Subramanian will serve as head of data science […]
Adobe and AppNexus plan to give marketers supply-chain transparency from the DSP to the SSP by partnering on a pilot program. Adobe Advertising Cloud will reveal all fees taken by the DSP, including the platform fee and any add-ons, as well as AppNexus’ bill to the publisher, which will help marketers track media dollars through […]
Building a successful media company today means creating a diverse portfolio of brands and revenue streams, according to Group Nine CEO Ben Lerer. Lerer embarked on this strategy more than a year ago when he created Group Nine Media. The holding company is composed of Thrillist, The Dodo, NowThis Media and Discovery’s Seeker, with $100 million […]
Demand-side platforms (DSPs) make money by taking a percentage of the media buys that flow through their technology – and from lots of other hidden extras they charge for. Interviews with more than a dozen sources reveal that even as marketers make progress in understanding what they’re paying for, nontransparent fees abound in the DSP […]
Condé Nast has long distinguished itself for having the right context to buy ads against. But these days, it’s also focusing on helping advertisers reach new audiences when they buy ads alongside its content with its Spire platform. Condé Nast allows advertisers to use its own data signals to build lookalike audiences and reach more […]
Most digital publishers are set up to make money through advertising, not by selling content. CollegeHumor operates with a different setup, which enabled it to quickly launch a hit Facebook Watch show. Since its Facebook Watch show, “I Want My Phone Back,” launched four months ago, it has accumulated more than 370,000 followers. In the […]
In 2017, five industry developments caused the ad tech industry to rethink how auction dynamics and quality controls should work in programmatic. These factors, detailed below, stem partly from header bidding, which made it harder for exchanges to win auctions and created a huge burden on DSPs to listen to more impressions. Supply chain issues […]
In India, the media company behind its biggest news websites – Times of India, The Economic Times and the Mumbai Mirror – also offers apps and sites where users can make restaurant reservations, study for a test, stream music, buy stocks or track cricket scores. By building its own ad tech stack and developing mobile-heavy […]
In 2017, many online publications realized that data and revenue diversification could drive success. And not being diversified enough could hurt their business. While many publishers tout their branded content businesses, programmatic provides a reliable, easily scalable revenue stream. Publishers that were programmatic holdouts, avoiding the main way advertisers do data-driven buying, course-corrected this year […]
Luma Partners’ Brian Andersen will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 17 – 18, 2018 at the Grand Hyatt New York. 2018 will see the same amount of deal activity as 2017 as the field of potential buyers expands, predicts Luma Partners’ Brian Andersen. The ad tech acquirers are much different from when Andersen joined […]
The New York Times acquired Wirecutter last year because its Consumer Reports-like product coverage mirrored the Times’ aspirations to expand into service journalism. “The Wirecutter was doing what the Times would have done if we were to start from scratch,” said David Perpich, Wirecutter’s president and general manager. Buying Wirecutter helped the Times diversify its […]
Campbell’s Soup wants to help solve the daily “dinner dilemma” – that period between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. when people figure out what’s for dinner. And who better qualified to brainstorm novel dinner recipes than IBM Watson? Last winter, Campbell’s Soup tested Watson Ads to dynamically recommend recipes in its ads, using the Chef […]
Rubicon’s CEO Michael Barrett will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on January 17 – 18, 2018 at the Grand Hyatt New York. Rubicon Project is in the midst of a risky move – one that CEO Michael Barrett thought he could avoid when he joined nine months ago. Because of customer outcry, the company stopped charging […]
Many digital publishers have had nothing but bad news to share this Q4 – from golden child BuzzFeed laying off staff to Mashable being sold for a bargain-basement price. But The New York Times is telling an upbeat story about its business with a new storyteller at the helm: Sebastian Tomich. Tomich, the company’s former […]
CPG advertisers running on Conde Nast properties will be able to target, optimize and measure campaigns using purchase data from Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) beginning in Q1 next year. The publisher wants to marry its expertise in creative development and sponsored content with an attention to attribution and the bottom line. “If you are not […]
Publishers are getting ensnared in the filters used by many advertisers to combat the YouTube brand safety crisis. Earlier this year, many brands found their ads running next to offensive content on the video platform, prompting marketers and their agencies to enlist third-party monitoring. Now publishers as a whole are feeling the effects. The filters […]
If understanding a customer’s long-term value were easy, every marketer would do it. But measuring LTV (long-term or lifetime value, referred to in some circles as customer lifetime value or CLV) is extremely tough. Brands must be able to identify and track customers over time, and they must work for companies that care about retaining […]
What if your media agency made your creative agency obsolete? Spark Foundry, which formed this year when Publicis Media retired the Mediavest Spark brand, is blurring the line between media and creative to give its clients a better chance of success. With the rise of sponsored content and social media, it makes sense for media and […]
BuzzFeed laid off 8% of its domestic workforce, or 100 people, Wednesday as the company diversifies beyond native advertising. Recode first reported the cuts. With 25% of revenue in 2017 coming from programmatic, affiliate links, commerce and non-native ads, many staffers working on the branded content side are being let go. Despite building a nine-figure revenue […]
