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.
In a media environment that increasingly favors scale, CafeMedia bought AdThrive on Thursday in a deal that will triple the reach it can offer to advertisers. AdThrive was founded by a blogger’s husband and manages all programmatic revenue for 1,100 other lifestyle bloggers. The deal, whose financial details were not disclosed, increases CafeMedia’s scale from […]
TapFwd, a mobile data marketplace founded by two LiveRamp vets, raised a $3 million seed round led by Partech Ventures. TapFwd matches online and offline data sets to mobile device IDs and then sells these data sets to help advertisers target campaigns. The rough analogy is “a BlueKai built from the ground up for mobile,” […]
The experienced sales team at Rodale, the publisher behind Men’s Health, Prevention and Runner’s World, sells most of its print and digital ad inventory direct. “They fluctuate between 70% and 100% sell-through,” said Diego Sanchez, executive director of digital programmatic and strategic partnerships, who leads a team of five. Due to the high level of […]
Every time a page loads, so do dozens of scripts that allow programmatic players to sync their identifiers with each other, slowing the load and causing audience loss. To solve the multiple identifier challenge, DigiTrust is bringing together a nonprofit co-op of platforms and publishers to create a single ID for demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side […]
Sourcepoint, a company founded last year to provide publishers with an antidote to ad blocking, has made its first major product release since raising a $10 million Series A round in June. The product, Dialogue, allows publishers to deliver a message to users with ad blockers installed and then test the efficacy of those messages. […]
BlueKai co-founder and CEO Omar Tawakol will leave his post as general manager and SVP of Oracle Data Cloud on Friday, two and a half years after Oracle acquired his company. Eric Roza, the former CEO of Datalogix and current co-SVP of Oracle Data Cloud, will step up to lead the group, according to Tawakol. […]
Google has been actively pushing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) since it launched last year. The company prioritizes AMP in the news carousel (increasing search traffic) and AMP pages are also showing up as regular search results, not just news searches. But AMP still has a way to go. In pursuing speed, the open-source project limits […]
No more unwanted sound. Less autoplay. And say goodbye to expanding ads, Rising Stars, 300x250s and 728x90s. The IAB is tackling cross-screen advertising and intrusive formats in its first set of standard ad units released since 2012. The public can comment on the proposed new portfolio over the next two months. “Technology and the user […]
Although The Washington Post partners with Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP, which help speed mobile load times, it’s also striking out on its own. Over a two-month period, a team of Post engineers cobbled together a proprietary tech solution called Zeus that sped mobile page-load times by 75%. Viewability improved by 20% in current […]
Xaxis is placing three bets on how it can evolve programmatic buying, according to global COO Nicolle Pangis. One, it wants to understand the entire consumer life cycle. That means using historical data and a team of data scientists to figure out when someone enters the market for an item and the best time to […]
A tough global economy has given way to cost-conscious marketers, short-tenured CMOs and squeezed agencies. These are the challenges Maxus Global CEO Lindsay Pattison must work through as she sets the vision for the GroupM agency. “We are the challenger group in the family,” said UK-based Pattison. “We are more data-driven. We didn’t come out […]
As the ad industry races to embrace mobile, social, data targeting and ad tech, Young & Rubicam (Y&R) CEO David Sable says it’s forgetting about the consumer. Audience targeting? Misses out on potential customers. Ad blocking? A reflection of the unchecked proliferation of ads. Sponsored content? It’s been around forever. But he also realizes ads […]
When Vice needed to diversify its distribution beyond Facebook and YouTube, it didn’t look to other digital platforms. Instead, said CEO Shane Smith, Vice partnered with HBO and hatched plans for a TV network. “We realized we couldn’t be hostage to Facebook and YouTube. We had to go off-platform,” he told WPP head Martin Sorrell […]
Let’s be honest: A/B testing is boring, but what about A/B testing on steroids? Vox Media is juicing up its testing with “creative intelligence” released Thursday at the DMEXCO conference in Cologne, Germany. The feature lets it test thousands of ad variants against certain audiences. “It can tell you if a creative is working better […]
BuzzFeed set its stake in branded content back when display was king. Today, as publications derive an increasing share of their revenue from branded content, Chief Revenue Officer Lee Brown sees that competition creating a market. “More awareness and education in the marketplace creates more opportunity for everyone,” Brown said. “We’re excited about our share […]
The fast-moving space of sponsored content has already gone through three different metrics. First, brands paid a CPM to show article snippets. Now cost per view dominates. When Medium launched its sponsored content program in April, it took the currency one step further. It charges for “total time read” (TTR), a metric that bets that […]
AccuWeather knew the CPMs it garnered from advertisers varied widely, a reflection of today’s programmatic audience-buying tactics. Like most publishers, the company relied mostly on intuition to match high CPMs to reader behaviors. One reason AccuWeather had limited insight was because its data was disconnected. DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), its advertising platform, analyzed ad revenue. […]
When Jason Wagenheim joined Fusion in May as its head of revenue, the Univision-owned pub was regrouping after a tumultuous year. ABC had handled ad sales until the joint venture with Univision split in April. In addition to the partner’s exit, Fusion dealt last year with reports of dismal traffic numbers. But Fusion has steadily […]
Data management platform Krux is joining the header-bidding fray. Krux built a header bidder because it wants marketers to buy both data and media in one place. Header bidding is the best mechanism to facilitate that transaction. By rolling out the tech, Krux adds a media-buying capability to Krux Link, the data exchange bazaar it’s […]
Business Insider’s sales team sells everything from programmatic to sponsored content and sponsorships. “One meeting will be focused on content creation, tentpole sponsorships and really big executions with lots of creative services layered in,” said CRO Pete Spande. “The next conversation might be about how their DMP [data management platform] connects to our DMP, and […]
HotelTonight, the five-year-old booking app, spends all its marketing budget on mobile. For CMO Ray Elias, who joined nine weeks ago after a decade at StubHub, being mobile-only gives HotelTonight an edge over its desktop-first competitors in the online travel agency space. “We exist in an elite group of customer experiences that really only work […]
When Thrillist’s branded video of a fake grandpa weightlifting on Muscle Beach tallied more than 50 million Facebook views in 48 hours, it seemed to validate the pub’s 2015 decision to expand its editorial and sponsored video operations. But Thrillist CoLab, the branded content arm of Thrillist, wanted to test if the viral hit actually […]
If AppNexus Chief Economist Gabriel Weintraub could go back in time to the beginning of real-time bidding (RTB), he would have designed a different type of auction. “Because you are targeting so finely, you are creating thin markets. So the question is, how do you create rules that alleviate that issue, especially from the publisher […]
Facebook just showed up to the header bidding party. Facebook confirmed it’s “exploring header bidding with a small set of publishers.” Those partners may include USA Today and Hearst, according to The Information, which was first to report the news. For Facebook, the move could mark a significant expansion of its Audience Network platform, expanding […]
When publishing content via social media, the biggest hits don’t always follow conventional wisdom. One of Scripps Networks Interactive’s most popular videos on social media featured best practices for storing fresh vegetables, according to Vikki Neil, the company’s SVP and GM of digital. Counterintuitively, the video performed much better on its HGTV channel than on […]
Auto shopping publisher Edmunds built an agency-like service designed to help auto dealers reach in-market car buyers on Facebook and Instagram. Car dealers set a budget and campaign parameters and an Edmunds sales rep enters the details into a Salesforce CRM system. That information gets sent to Facebook via API and the campaign goes live […]
While many marketers prioritize reaching Hispanic audiences, they have trouble finding them online. That’s a problem Batanga hopes to address. The Hispanic-focused publisher of sites like iMujer, Vix and BolsaDeMulher attracts 1 million to 4 million US cross-platform uniques per month, according to comScore, and 14 million desktop uniques worldwide, mainly in Latin America. Batanga, […]
Native is a big deal to The Atlantic, where sponsored content will comprise 75% of digital revenue this year. It employs a 30-person team, dubbed Atlantic Re:think, to create campaigns for clients like Porsche, TIAA and Cathay Pacific. The team operates with the philosophy that “engagement is an art and science,” said Michael Monroe, the […]
A number of ad tech companies posted enough growth to make Inc. Magazine’s annual 500/5000 revenue survey released Wednesday, while others fell off after making the 2015 list. The survey tracks three-year revenue growth of independent companies, though the results aren’t audited and may include media costs, which can drive up gross revenue. Advertising and […]
Morgan Auto Group spends 60% of its budget on digital advertising to support its 11 north Florida car dealerships. That percentage has steadily increased over the past five years, according to Tom Moore, SVP of Morgan Auto Group. It tracks with changing consumer behavior as shoppers first research online or contact dealers via phone or […]
