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.
Texting and messaging friends tends to bring out our inner foodies, and the Food Network has used a Facebook Messenger bot to join that conversation. Food Network has invested in its chatbot since it first launched in November 2016, even after the initial hype dropped off. While other brands and publishers had difficulties being conversational […]
Agency holding company stocks are down. Many of the biggest advertisers are struggling. Omnicom agency Hearts & Science thinks it’s found the solution to serve clients in an era of disruption. “It’s a highly commoditized media marketplace, and will only get more so because of automation,” said Frances Ralston-Good, UK CEO of Hearts & Science. […]
With header bidding enabled, the open marketplace works just fine for Advance Local. While many publishers and buyers are moving to closed, curated programmatic environments due to brand safety, fraud and viewability concerns, Advance Local is focused on driving yield in the open marketplace. That strategy means improving viewability and giving buyers transparent URL information […]
Programmatic is suffering from a crisis in confidence from marketers. And that crisis affects premium publishers like CBS Interactive. But there are solutions on the horizon, according to Jason White, SVP and GM of global programmatic revenue at CBS Interactive. Header bidding, for example, will boost transparency in the marketplace and even the playing field […]
Dentsu Aegis wants to be a 100% digital-economy business by 2020. To get there, the agency appointed Nigel Morris to serve as the company’s chief strategy and innovation officer in June. Morris will focus on the “important, not the urgent,” in the new role, an upgrade from his previous position as head of Americas. Over […]
Direct-to-consumer, digitally native startups like Mack Weldon own their own data and don’t rely on middlemen. Those two huge advantages enable them to track marketing effectiveness with greater precision than their brick-and-mortar counterparts. But to do so, they need platforms that allow them to use every piece of information they can collect about their customers. […]
Programmatic has been going through its awkward period. Brands are rethinking their investments in the wake of concerns about brand safety, viewability, fraud and a murky supply chain. But where other agencies and trading desks are pulling back on the open marketplace, WPP’s Essence is staying neck-deep, relying on its use of machine learning, optimization […]
OpenX acquired two publisher tools, Mezzobit and PubNation, on Monday. By bringing these point solutions in-house, the SSP plans to strengthen its overall offering for publishers. The tools don’t boost yield for publishers, which is how publishers typically grade SSPs, but rather help them track down slow or suspicious advertiser tags and monitor overall ad […]
To be a modern broadcaster, CNN believes it has to distribute content everywhere and be a launch partner when platforms like Snapchat Discover, Apple News and Facebook Messenger roll out publisher products. In the past two years, CNN has added roughly 20 platforms to its distribution list and, in the past year, it spent $20 […]
Demographic targeting and behavioral targeting have both been around since internet advertising’s early days, but big CPG brands now say behavioral targeting drives the biggest results online. Instead of trying to hit in-target demos, they’re looking for more creative ways to connect with consumers based on purchase history or interests. At Dmexco, Johnson & Johnson CMO […]
WPP’s stock is down. And the company’s longstanding chief, Martin Sorrell, isn’t sure if the holding company can do anything about the factors putting pressure on its business. “I don’t know whether anything is within our control or not,” Sorrell said. “Some people say it’s the rise of the digital giants. No. Some people say […]
Axel Springer joined the Coalition for Better Ads on Wednesday partially because it didn’t want Google, a member of the coalition, to have an outsize say in what counted as a better ad experience. Despite being a dominant European publisher, Axel Springer is worried about US platforms like Google dictating industry standards or positioning to […]
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will become law next May, is stressing out the marketing industry. “I have a feeling that people are just scared,” Acxiom’s European privacy officer, Sachiko Scheuing, told AdExchanger at Dmexco in Cologne, Germany. That fear may be preventing many advertisers from speaking up in the debate over […]
Slideshows have been hurt by growing demand for viewable inventory, as readers rarely scroll down and often click to the next slide before ads load. Topix, which buys traffic to slideshows that rack up tons of page views, was affected by this shift. Four months ago, the site’s viewability hovered around 40%, so programmatic buyers […]
The IAB Tech Lab wants to change its OpenRTB 3.0 programmatic auction standard so that it authenticates basic details of the transaction, like the identity of the seller. The current OpenRTB standard assumes buyers and sellers honestly identify themselves and their intentions – but some shady players took advantage of that honor system. One problem […]
Despite rising content marketing budgets, the logistics of briefing multiple publishers, approving content and measuring results makes it difficult to scale investments. To help brands and agencies address this logistical pain point, Pressboard designed a platform to automate, standardize and scale sponsored content. The company has helped clients such as GE, Ford, General Mills and […]
Taste of Home amassed almost 6 million followers on its Facebook pages, where readers actively commented and shared posts – without ever hiring anyone to run audience development. That raw engagement attracted Kari Hodes to join in January as Trusted Media Brands’ (which owns Taste of Home) VP of digital content and audience development. Hodes […]
The publication that shunned banner ads reversed course last week when BuzzFeed added programmatic ads. The decision came down to two factors: increased advertiser demand for programmatic and a better user experience, said Ken Blom, BuzzFeed’s VP of branded distribution, who leads the 30-person team that will handle the programmatic logistics. “We don’t want to […]
AppNexus and Index Exchange have the broadest adoption of their adapters and wrappers, according to the first-ever Header Bidding Index – a report from ServerBid, an Adzerk spinoff that builds wrappers for the demand side. Seventy percent of the top 1,000 publishers running programmatic advertising use header bidding, according to the report, which ServerBid created […]
When it comes to anything new in the programmatic space, Intermarkets tends to be an early adopter. Header bidding? Check. Server-side header bidding? Check. Programmatic native? Check. Erik Requidan, VP of sales and programmatic strategy at Intermarkets, which represents right-leaning political publishers such as the Drudge Report, aims to balance all that new tech with […]
Before Yieldbot CEO Jonathan Mendez laid off one-third of the company’s employees in mid-July, the company had suffered a series of setbacks. With $10 million in funding last year, Yieldbot bet on a header bidding wrapper that didn’t pay off. Instead, AppNexus won the header bidding wrapper wars with Prebid. Then it had a bad […]
The second-price auction is crumbling. All the major exchanges/SSPs – with the exception of Google AdX – are rolling out or are deep in experiments with first-price header bidding auctions. The tests vary in aggressiveness and scope from exchange to exchange, with AppNexus, Index Exchange and OpenX leading the charge, and with visions of much […]
Engaged readers make for loyal subscribers. The New York Times’ mobile app, which the publisher once feared would cannibalize its desktop subscriber rate, has proven to be the watering hole where many of the Times’ young, engaged readers hang out. Readers within the app rank among the most loyal and committed, in terms of the […]
Google’s latest anti-fraud measure aims to stamp out ad fraud by clawing back money from the exchanges where its DSP purchased fraudulent inventory. In Q4, DoubleClick Bid Manager will give advertisers the option to buy only from exchanges that will refund media spend for fraudulent inventory. Over the past month, Google’s DSP has issued advertisers […]
If a new ad tech partner generates $50,000 in revenue for a publisher, is it safe to assume that gross revenue will increase by the same amount? Publishers that unify their analytics and rigorously test those partners increasingly are finding that the answer is no. “There is no such thing as purely incremental revenue,” said […]
Oppenheimer & Co. managing director and senior analyst Jason Helfstein will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming PROGRAMMATIC I/O New York conference on Oct. 25-26 in a presentation titled “Programmatic Wall Street.” Wall Street is changing how it looks at ad tech. The Trade Desk went public, and its consistent overperformance has made it the darling of investors who had sworn […]
Publishers paying to promote content on social platforms need to determine the return on their ad spend, just like marketers. The sites Tickld, Clipd and Knowable, part of the “Pulse” division at publishing company Gateway Blend, rely on social platforms to distribute content. Gateway Blend used to optimize the ad campaigns for Pulse content with […]
The LGBTQ dating app Grindr’s 3 million daily users spend almost an hour per day on the platform, according to the company. But some advertisers steer clear of dating traffic due to concerns of brand safety. And Grindr’s audience includes subscribers who pay for ad-free experiences. So Grindr branched out by creating lifestyle publication Into, […]
Brands often have a long list of people they don’t want to show ads to: customers who just bought a product, current subscribers, non-subscribers or a group of people in their CRM database they know won’t qualify or be interested in a product. To avoid showing ads to people – a technique called audience suppression […]
Condé Nast’s Evan Adlman will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming PROGRAMMATIC I/O New York conference on October 25-26 on a panel titled “Data Accuracy And The DMP.” Until recently, buyers who wanted to access Condé Nast’s ad inventory programmatically struggled to find enough impressions to buy. “The perception when I joined was that there wasn’t much scale there, and it […]
