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.
When online infrastructure company Dyn got hit by three DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks Friday, it shut down major sites using Dyn, including Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify and The New York Times. The attack also disrupted the ad industry. Even if a publisher wasn’t affected, the attack impacted many of the tech partners delivering and […]
The cable model may be going online, if last week’s reports around a possible Snapchat licensing model are true. (Snapchat declined to comment.) Publishers would receive a licensing fee for their content on Snapchat Discover, instead of selling ads themselves and taking a share of revenue. By moving to this model, Snapchat would consolidate all its […]
This year, Facebook appeared to abandon its plan to develop an ad tech stack to rival Google’s DoubleClick. It shut down its SSP (LiveRail), closed the Facebook Exchange and threw away its DSP before it got off the ground. All that remains is Atlas, a former ad server repurposed as a measurement tool, and the […]
By using an overhead shot of hands quickly mixing rainbow cake pops, potato spirals and other creative treats, Tastemade has mastered shooting video for audiences who are using their phones or scrolling through social media. “Today’s modern media company needs to be mobile, social, global,” said programming head Oren Katzeff. “Looking back 30 years to […]
The IAB unveiled a dynamic content ad standard that will move forward programmatic creative, which is open for public comment for the next month. Instead of churning out ads with dozens of different messages for different channels, advertisers simply define all the creative components and variations. Once served, the ads will dynamically assemble to adapt […]
Metamarkets has raised $14.25 million in growth capital from Wellington Financial and City National Bank. The company’s analytics software is designed to help clients like Twitter, Nanigans, AOL, OpenX and Drawbridge gain insight into their programmatic marketplaces. Metamarkets got the funding in part because investors are looking more favorably at ad tech, said company co-founder […]
Julie Clark will speak at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC I/O Conference in New York on Oct. 26. Hearst had deployed header bidding for years before it became one of the industry’s hot topics. As a veteran user of header bidding, Hearst focuses on adapting it to make programmatic buying more efficient for marketers and publishers. “The old way would […]
AppNexus laid off 150 of its 1,125 employees on Thursday and Friday, a 13% reduction of its workforce. Internally, the company is telling employees the cuts are part of a reorg that will unify its buy-side and sell-side product groups, which have operated separately until now with distinct engineering, sales and service teams. The company’s […]
For evidence that TV and digital media are continuing to converge, look no further than Discovery Communications. Discovery has invested $100 million in Group Nine Media, a newly formed media holding company that will include four brands: Thrillist, NowThis Media, The Dodo and Discovery’s Seeker. As part of the deal, Discovery Communications will start selling […]
Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba wants to use location data to improve how it sells products. It didn’t want to build the tech itself, so Alibaba hired PlaceIQ to make sense of its massive reams of customer data. That’s not all. Alibaba also invested an undisclosed amount in the $25 million Series D round PlaceIQ closed […]
MaxPoint helps marketers in the CPG, retail, finance, insurance and auto sectors deliver messages to customers near local stores that need a marketing boost. Now those marketers are itching to use all the first-party data they’ve collected. To activate advertisers’ CRM data, MaxPoint developed Customer Catalyst, a product that matches brands’ CRM with data showing […]
InStyle fans tuning into Facebook Live earlier this year watched a La Mer expert conduct a skin consultation with an InStyle editor. The editorial video with brand integration became one of the first examples of Time Inc.’s Social Now ad product. “We are providing very authentic and transparent ways for advertisers to play [with Facebook […]
Local advertising is undergoing dramatic change. Because this presidential election has relied on earned media instead of TV, revenue for local broadcasters who aren’t in swing states has gone down. And it’s not an anomaly. This pattern has “forever changed political advertising,” said Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates. Facebook is making a play for […]
The New York Times’ new Flex Frame ads are among the first component-based ads deployed in the wild with the help of Google tech. The ads adjust their look and feel according to screen type and page environment. Expect other publishers to follow with their own versions over the next year. The Flex Frame ads […]
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 […]
