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.
When La-Z-Boy decided to use Oracle’s data management platform, it didn’t want the technology to sit around. Instead, it came up with a turbo-charged strategy to aggressively test, learn and adapt. The furniture maker’s agency, RPA, tested 168 audiences in 10 months using first-party, second-party and third-party data it loaded into the platform. Its audience-focused […]
As its sell-side business takes off due to the success of its Prebid open source wrapper, AppNexus’ buy-side operation is treading water relative to rivals such as The Trade Desk. Now the company is considering downplaying it further. In recent months, AppNexus executives have pondered using parts of its buy-side business as a bargaining chip […]
Lorne Brown, former CEO of Operative and president of SintecMedia, will ascend to the CEO position at Sintec Media. Outgoing CEO Amotz Yarden will assume a seat on the board. As CEO, Brown plans to continue executing the vision he and Yarden laid out last November when SintecMedia acquired Operative for $200 million, about six […]
IBM-owned pub The Weather Co. is working to tap into people-based marketing budgets that would normally go to Facebook or Google by using LiveRamp’s IdentityLink product. Marketers and publishers alike onboard their data to LiveRamp’s huge online identity graph to kick off the process. Because LiveRamp can identify many more users than a marketer or […]
The Wall Street Journal recently began serving up content-driven ads, where a subscriber reading about oil prices might see a display unit with related content – thought leadership from financial advertisers like HSBC, Credit Suisse, Blackrock and ING. To ensure those ads are next to relevant content, the newspaper works with Smartology’s semantic profiling technology, […]
When South African agency Hitch Digital buys inventory programmatically, it finds that foreign publishers are often much more willing than local ones to strike private marketplace deals. In recent years, publishers like MSN, Hearst and Forbes readily set up private marketplaces for Hitch’s clients. But local publishers, whose content directly addresses the South African market […]
Rubicon Project has been steadily lowering its take rate over the past year to make its tech more appealing to publishers and buyers, who have pushed back against hidden fees. During its earnings call Tuesday, the company revealed that the declining take rates are one part of its strategy to offer the most value for […]
As branded content becomes a bigger part of media budgets, marketers need to show how content is driving results for their brands. They want to prove that content can create not just awareness, but also purchase consideration and sales. To help marketers achieve those objectives, Refinery29 rolled out a product Monday dubbed Converge to connect […]
Because 30-50% of direct campaigns on Business Insider transact on a viewable CPM, getting those campaigns to deliver the contracted amount without wasting inventory helps the publisher’s bottom line. Making sure campaigns deliver within those stringent requirements – including 100% viewability – is one of the jobs of Marc Boswell, SVP of revenue operations and […]
Match Media Group runs an ad business for a dating subscription company. Because ad business revenue accounts for only a small piece of the pie, the ad team always considers the effects of its ads on the user experience. “A fairly good parallel is Amazon,” said Peter Foster, GM of global advertising and brand solutions. […]
Outbrain acquired native DSP Zemanta for an undisclosed sum Tuesday. The deal will bring together Outbrain’s scaled native supply with Zemanta’s demand, laying the groundwork for Outbrain to position itself as a leader in the still-nascent programmatic native ecosystem. Outbrain bought the DSP because it expects native advertising to become larger than display advertising in […]
Monster considers itself a challenger brand. The early leader in the online job space commands high awareness among older job-seekers. Unfortunately, millennials are more likely to think of Monster as an energy drink. When its VP of performance marketing and media, Brian Costello, joined Monster a year ago, he wanted to switch the thinking of […]
The mattress space went from sleepy to startup hot in just years. Utah-based Purple is one of those bed-in-a-box startups trying to gain a foothold in a space that’s becoming crowded with new entrants, including Casper, Leesa, Tuft and Needle and Saatva. Purple is getting the word out with a social video-heavy strategy that focuses […]
Digital offers more precise measurement than most channels, which has helped move the industry from an art to a science, according to Brian Andersen of Luma Partners. “And as part of that [transition], they need to know: How do we manage our data? How do we use our data for targeting? How do you understand […]
Granite Media, which is launching its first site, Work and Money, this week, wants to prove that a publication can run profitably with 100% programmatic ads and still turn out quality content. “There are very few digital only, programmatic-only companies that are actually profitable,” said Granite Media CEO Danny Khatib. “That’s the problem we are […]
Sovrn CEO Walter Knapp sat down in a conference room on June 27 and told 27 staffers it would be their last day. Knapp told AdExchanger the layoffs were proactive. Before the layoffs, the company had grown from 50 people to more than 250 staffers in two years. It raised $18 million in August 2015, […]
Time Inc. knows that producing magazine content requires data – like seeing how many issues sell based on the cover story. But digital allows for an additional level of analysis the magazine-native publisher hadn’t fully embraced. Which is why Time Inc. pruned down its more than five dozen analytics tools and focused on just a […]
For smaller publishers or influencers, ad revenue isn’t always the strongest path to monetization. Many want direct relationships with consumers. They want to stake out their own URL to build on a social media presence. On their own site, they prefer to charge for subscriptions, accept donations or sell products in order to support their […]
When New York Media charted its digital strategy, it chose not to go local. Instead, the publisher of New York magazine created standalone blogging brands with national distribution around fashion (The Cut), culture (Vulture) and food (Grub Street). And it’s since added tech (Select All) and science (The Science Of Us) to the list of […]
The Guardian UK is taking ownership of its ad stack. “Publishers have given away control of our digital businesses through programmatic. And we have all been disintermediated,” said Danny Spears, programmatic director of Guardian News and Media. Programmatic accounts for 85% of the Guardian UK’s display advertising business, Spears said: “And as programmatic becomes a […]
Food brands that want their ad creative to appear next to recipes for quick and easy dinners, Japanese food or gluten-free meals can buy inventory via CafeMedia’s private marketplaces that fits into those content categories. CafeMedia created those content categories using IBM Watson’s artificial intelligence (AI). Traditionally, companies use content management systems to categorize and […]
Removing a bad ad unit can mean that publishers take a big revenue hit. The most intrusive ad units often please advertisers and drive large amounts of revenue. And a heavy ad load brings in more revenue per page view. So how do publishers balance the two? And when do they decide to pull the […]
The public comment period for ads.txt, the initiative by IAB Tech Lab to cut down on domain-spoofed traffic, is now over. But are marketers, their agencies and DSPs ready to adopt? Yes and no. To be fair, it’s still quite early. Publishers are actively creating ads.txt files and DSPs are scanning them. The IAB Tech […]
Amazon’s Transparent Ad Marketplace (TAM) is the new kid on the block. But like with most of its endeavors, Amazon is readying itself to disrupt the existing paradigm. With TAM, Amazon is angling to take market share away from client-side header bidding wrapper Prebid and Google’s year-old exchange bidding product, which just entered open beta. […]
Spice manufacturer McCormick’s online ads draw in consumers with recipes that include unexpected but on-trend pairings, like a Greek yogurt taco dip. But creating many versions of online ads ran up costs with its creative agency. “We would get very targeted with our media campaigns, and we wanted our creative messaging to follow suit,” said […]
Ad tech talent is packing up and moving on. Longtime ad tech insiders – many who started before the dot-com boom – see their peers moving to other industries or fleeing for safety into the arms of the duopoly. When Ari Paparo, founder and CEO of Beeswax, tweeted, “The best people are leaving the business […]
A new IAB Tech Lab standard will help publishers and platforms make their header bidding container setups as efficient as possible. The lab will accept public comment on the standard through July 28. The lab decided to create a baseline standard because header bidding has started to mature. “We don’t create standards until something has […]
McAfee uses account-based marketing to reach its target list of 788 companies in the Americas it wants to buy its software. McAfee made the switch to a more targeted B2B marketing approach last year. Because many IT buyers conduct research online before contacting a sales rep toward the end of the research process, the marketing […]
Publishers need scale to survive. Fusion Media Group is an example of that strategy in action. The modern Fusion Media Group is about a year and a half in the making. Univision first expanded by buying The Root from The Washington Post, and then a stake in The Onion. In August, it bought Gawker Media […]
Advertisers buying on the open marketplace often sacrifice viewability, quality and transparency for cheaper prices and scale. But as more buyers decline to make that concession, the pendulum is swinging toward curated publisher lists. And many DSPs now offer to shoulder the burden of setting up private marketplace deals for their clients. Recently Centro, which […]
