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.
Header bidding has been great for nToggle. The startup uses machine learning to shape the bidstream for buying platforms. Instead of looking at every potential impression, nToggle filters out ones it thinks the DSP is unlikely to bid on, reducing the amount of queries by an average of 90%. Fewer queries to look at translates […]
Alphabet beat its earnings forecast in the first quarter, sending the stock up 5% in after-hours trading. Revenue increased 22% year over year to $24.75 billion. The positive earnings report, however, was overshadowed by investor questions about the YouTube brand safety crisis. Since January, brands and agencies have withdrawn spend, leading Google to improve controls […]
An advertiser looking to boost response rates for a mobile offer can employ a simple solution: Target commuters on crowded trains. And if there’s a delay or disruption, response rates rise further. The reason? The more crowded the subway car, the more consumers immerse themselves in their phones to avoid contact with the strangers next […]
As header bidding grows, ad exchanges are sending more ad impressions per second and DSPs must evaluate more impressions than ever. The massive uptick in volume, which far outpaces programmatic revenue growth, is straining ad tech infrastructure. With more queries to sift through, it costs more to buy the same ads. And as a result, […]
Most of the 2 million couples who get married each year in the United States visit XO Group’s The Knot website when planning their big event. So how does a company that’s already cornered the wedding-planning market grow? XO Group wants to move from inspiring brides to helping them coordinate their weddings. It hopes to […]
Scale gets digital publishers noticed by advertisers, but audiences increasingly want content addressing niche interests, not broad ones. Some digital pubs, like Vox Media, build out a portfolio of completely separate brands, while others develop sub-brands, like BuzzFeed’s food-focused Tasty. Mic, which raised $21 million in Series C funding in April to fuel expansion, launched […]
Chocolate eggs are big business for Hershey’s, the company behind Reese’s peanut butter cups and Cadbury eggs. The candymaker generates $550 million in sales of Easter candies, making it the second-biggest holiday after Halloween. The beloved Reese’s Eggs fill up Easter baskets everywhere. But this year, the Easter candy market became more competitive as other […]
Black Angus Steakhouse operates 45 restaurants in six states. And it’s just hired its first chief marketing officer, Liz Geavaras, to bring a fresh approach to the 53-year-old restaurant group’s marketing. Geavaras will dial back Black Angus’ heavy print expenditures, replacing them with digital. She also plans to segment customers and customize messages to address […]
Craft beer has wooed away upscale beer drinkers away from imported beers, including 600-year-old beer brand Hacker-Pschorr. The German beer has been popular among German expats in Chicago and Minneapolis for the past few decades. But with the core demographic aging and dialing down its beer consumption, Hacker-Pschorr needed to look at a younger generation […]
The Weinstein Co.’s Oscar-nominated tearjerker “Lion” was a big hit in markets where the distributor expected to see more modest results – including Salt Lake City, Boise, Kentucky, Dallas, Houston, Nebraska, Minneapolis and Las Vegas. Native content created by values-oriented publisher FamilyShare and distributed on Facebook improved the box office receipts in those markets. The […]
In 2015, Gannett started using a free tool from ShareThis to optimize Facebook posts by testing more than one headline or image at a time. Since then the tool has significantly supported two goals: improving Gannett’s engagement on Facebook and driving audiences to USA Today sites such as sports property FTW. “This allows us to […]
PopSugar’s young female readers are turning into young female viewers. What started out a decade ago as a celebrity news site has used its foothold to expand into a dozen verticals, including food, fitness and moms. And PopSugar increasingly tells its stories via video. PopSugar Fitness is the standout, with more than 1 million followers […]
Like other platform-focused media companies, Vice produces lots of data. Its sources include an ad server, programmatic ad exchange, data management platform, site analytics, viewability analytics, order-management software, Facebook and YouTube. As the media brand increased its data team from one to three data scientists, Vice knew it needed to collate its sources and automate […]
The “last-look” advantage Google’s ad server gave to Google’s ad exchange so bothered publishers and exchanges that it gave rise to header bidding. As of this week, that advantage is no more, AdExchanger has learned. Google just reworked its auction so it no longer favors itself in the allocation of bids. A support document this […]
Exchanges, including Rubicon Project, charge publishers a fee for providing access to their ad inventory. But many publishers don’t realize that most supply-side platforms also charge a fee to buyers. That lack of transparency so incensed The Guardian that it sued Rubicon Project on Tuesday to recover undisclosed buyer fees, as Business Insider first reported […]
As advertisers yank spend from YouTube and Google Display Network due to brand safety concerns, premium publishers see an opportunity. These pubs have long complained that audience-based buying devalues the context they provide – context they claim ensures brand safety. “Marketers are recognizing in a blunt force way the difference between a platform and publisher,” […]
Centro has updated its platform so media planners can manage direct-sold campaigns and programmatic ones in one place. The company combined its DSP SiteScout, acquired in 2013, with its workflow automation software for I/O-based buys. It was part of a three-year, $25 million platform update that began after the SiteScout purchase. “When we reset our […]
More than 1,700 publishers belong to the Local Media Consortium (LMC), and not all of them are experts on programmatic. The organization, which operates a local news ad exchange and negotiates technology deals for its members, counts massive publishing groups like Scripps, McClatchy and Tronc as its members, along with single papers like The Seattle […]
Targeting a running watch to a broad group like “runners” on Facebook doesn’t cut it anymore. Bold Worldwide, a social media agency with a roster of sports-focused clients, advocates that its brands – including running and cycling watch Polar – massively increase the amount of content they create. With more versions of ads, they can […]
NewsCred on Wednesday laid off 10% of its staff as it changes its product offering and adds advisory services to its content marketing software. As part of the reorg, NewsCred hired a president and COO, Charles Hough. “We’ve been selling [brands] content marketing platforms, but they need expert services, and someone to hold their hand […]
When Bonnie Kintzer became the CEO at Trusted Media Brands three years ago, the Reader’s Digest publisher had just emerged from bankruptcy. Kinzter’s mission was to turn the company around and get it growing again. She had worked at Readers Digest before and appreciated that the company had “very strong brands that were absolutely serving […]
Concerns over ads appearing next to extremist YouTube content has led Havas UK, The Guardian, L’Oréal and the UK government to pull advertising spend from YouTube and Google Display Network. The UK government’s interest in stamping out extremist videos has been brewing for some time. According to a February article in The Times, the UK […]
Sponsored content is going programmatic, courtesy of a partnership between native ad company Nativo, and demand-side platform The Trade Desk. GroupM’s native ad division, Plista, will be a key buyer in the new partnership. The deals transact via a private marketplace, but with fixed pricing. Nativo will add in a programmatic guaranteed option later this […]
Rubicon Project founder Frank Addante has stepped down as CEO. Former AdMeld and Millennial Media chief Michael Barrett is Rubicon’s new CEO, effective immediately. Addante will switch to a strategic and advisory role as chairman of Rubicon’s board. Barrett has a history of turning companies around and getting them sold. As CEO of Millennial Media, he took a company […]
The Economist collects plenty of data, but until recently each type, including browsing or subscriber data, could only be analyzed in a vacuum. That meant The Economist didn’t know the types of content viewed by its most loyal subscribers and couldn’t identify the behavior of readers at risk of dropping their subscriptions. For advertising, those […]
Data-driven advertising requires good data. But lots of bad data and questionable data practices can harm a marketing campaign. Marketers need to know when to use their own data, and when to rely on partners. They need to understand the trade-offs between cost, accuracy and scale. They need to know where their data came from, […]
Sean Moriarty wears a marketing hat half the time and a publisher hat the other half. He joined Demand Media in 2014 as its CEO and has since grown the company’s commerce business to more than half of its revenue. Moriarty also led Demand Media’s rebranding to Leaf Group in November to move it away […]
Facebook is again tackling cross-device measurement and attribution. Although its Atlas product struggled as an ad server in the marketplace, Atlas could successfully use Facebook IDs to measure across devices and help marketers assess campaign performance. Now Facebook is making those features available to marketers through its Business Manager, in a tool dubbed Advanced Measurement. […]
If publishers and platforms often hold contentious relationships with each other, NBCUniversal shows signs of wanting to change that frenemy dynamic. Leading up to last week’s Snapchat IPO, NBCUniversal invested $500 million in the video messaging and content app, CNBC reported Friday. That investment would give the media company an approximately a 2% stake, according to […]
What works better for publishers: Snapchat or Instagram Stories? Both platforms are quickly gaining ground as ways for publishers to distribute their content to wider audiences. Snapchat made its public offering Thursday, and Instagram Stories launched last year with a competitive, video-focused offering. While each platform claims more than 150 million daily users, Snapchat and […]
