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.
The FTC reached a settlement with Lord & Taylor on Tuesday for an influencer marketing campaign last March that did not disclose to consumers that the content was a paid endorsement. While the luxury goods company won’t have to pay a fine, in the future it will need to not only require disclosure from influencers, […]
Automated guaranteed has been the slowest part of programmatic to get off the ground. But one of its biggest proponents is the Dentsu Aegis-owned trading desk Amnet, which sees the technology as key to making programmatic a central part of everything an agency does. From January to December last year, budgets going to automated guaranteed […]
To reach the diverse purchasers of Hunt’s Tomatoes with the message that would best resonate with them, ConAgra looked to its customer data. ConAgra – which owns the brand –created dozens of messages targeting dozens of consumer segments for a campaign that ran from September through early March. The goal was to move away from […]
When Heineken moved more of its advertising budget to digital video, it didn’t see results. “Digital never rose to the top [in marketing mix models], in an almost mind-boggling way,” said Ron Amram, VP of media for Heineken USA. But Heineken knew its audience was moving to digital environments, so it didn’t want to leave […]
To reach its youthful audience, Taco Bell frequently tests platforms before some of the details are figured out, such as measurement. But that strategy is working: The company’s sales have grown in each of the past four years, fueled by the success of Doritos Locos Tacos in 2012. In 2013, Taco Bell became the first […]
Among the findings of this week’s programmatic survey from Forrester and the Association of National Advertisers is this alarming nugget: Programmatic adoption could be hindered unless marketers continue to push for transparency – and make progress getting it. “We need to move from awareness and education to policy and action,” said Jim Nail, principal analyst at Forrester, […]
Marketers love data, but there are still ways it can fail them. Marketers need to push themselves and their agencies to be accountable for sales, not false metrics often used as proxies for actual sales, said speakers at the ANA’s Masters of Marketing conference in Orlando, Fla., this week. “My No. 1 goal is to align […]
Evolve Media co-founder and President Brian Fitzgerald has been in digital media since the dot-com era. He’s bought and sold companies and lived through boom and bust cycles. As the industry continues to evolve – with waves of investment in digital media companies and ad tech consolidation – Fitzgerald is taking action. In the past […]
Marketers on LinkedIn have long been able to target titles like “VP of engineering” for sponsored updates and inMails. On Tuesday, LinkedIn rolled out account targeting, allowing marketers to target actual companies in their campaigns, up to 30,000 of them at a time. Wait, LinkedIn couldn’t target by company before? “This has been one of the […]
Facebook’s Atlas ad server promises to deliver marketers a superior way to measure campaigns compared to DoubleClick, which commands the lion’s share of the market. But measurement is just one part of ad serving. And in the one and a half years since Atlas was rushed to market, marketers and agencies that have tested Atlas […]
In areas where other companies are growing fast – mobile, social and video – Rocket Fuel is actually losing market share, according to its fourth-quarter earnings report released Wednesday. Rocket Fuel reported $46.9 million in revenue from mobile, social and video channels in the last quarter of 2015, an 18% year-over-year decline. In comparison, Rocket […]
In a bid to enhance its header bidding wrapper and improve yield for publishers, Index Exchange has tapped Drew Bradstock as its new SVP of product. Bradstock spent the past five years as group product manager of Google’s Ad Exchange. The move brings Bradstock back to focusing on a fast-growing exchange, he said, that looks more […]
Rubicon Project’s full-year financials paint a picture of a growing exchange. The company’s managed revenue hit $1 billion in 2015. With a growing take rate, 22.6% for the year, that tallied up to $227.3 million, an 81% annual increase. The amount Rubicon takes from transactions on its exchange increased from 19.3% in Q4 of 2014 […]
The wave of ad tech consolidation continues with Tuesday’s announcement that Synacor will purchase publisher tech vendor Technorati. The purchase price won’t be revealed until Synacor, a publicly traded company, files its 8-K to the SEC. [Update: Synacor paid $3 million cash.] Technorati posted $7 million in revenue last year, mostly from its aging ad […]
Google is less than two weeks away from releasing its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) into the wild. The AMP program will move out of its test phase and begin displaying the mobile-optimized content pages in its search results before the end of the month, and possibly as early as next week, according to AdExchanger sources. […]
To help publishers manage multiple header bidding partners, OpenX created a server-to-server wrapper dubbed OpenX Meta, which it unveiled Thursday. The advantage of OpenX Meta is that it moves all the action – long, slow bid requests – off a publisher’s page and onto its server. From there, it can quickly ping all the other […]
The New York Times’ two-year-old sponsored content initiative is an apparent success: T Brand Studio posted more than $30 million in revenue in 2015, double what it did in 2014. That $30 million was just a slice of the $197 million in digital revenue the company recorded last year. Much of the rest is what […]
Ad tech has long poached talent from agencies and publishers. But those with publishing backgrounds have been returning to the media world recently. Media companies are seeing an uptick in resumes from people with ad tech backgrounds. Plus, as companies have created programmatic roles, they’ve staffed them with people who have experience in the ad […]
Why shouldn’t Time Inc. take on Facebook? The 94-year-old media brand will acquire ad platform company Viant for its “people-based” marketing capabilities, the companies said Thursday. Viant – an amalgam of companies that rebranded a year ago from Interactive Media Holdings (IMH) – includes the remains of MySpace, ad network Specific Media, video ad platform Vindico and Xumowill, a smart […]
Fatherly co-founder Michael Rothman hopes that when the typical Thrillist reader grows up and has a baby, he will start reading Fatherly. Rothman, an early employee at Thrillist who worked there until 2012, realized that many in the site’s target audience were growing up and having kids. But content for those dads – funny, a […]
In an age of banner blindness, nearly every publisher has added a sponsored content offering. Meanwhile, programmatic native is replacing banners and boxes. The programmatic native bucket, which includes Outbrain, TripleLift, Sharethrough, Taboola and Yahoo Gemini, features advertising in the form of article snippets, which look similar to sponsored content teasers. Sponsored content, by contrast, […]
LinkedIn acquired Bizo in July 2014 with grand visions of making a B2B ad platform. Those visions haven’t panned out. During its Q4 earnings call Thursday, the company said it would kill off Lead Accelerator, the B2B lead-nurturing product that came out of the $175 million acquisition of Bizo. It was a fast death: LinkedIn […]
Media CEOs have to do a lot of maneuvering to steer a print/digital publication, and many take different routes. At the American Magazine Media Conference in New York on Tuesday, five executives from Hearst, Condé Nast, Time Inc., Meredith and Rodale discussed how they compete with disruptive digital-first publications by investing, acquiring or imitating them. “With […]
For three trends affecting publishers today – native advertising, outside investments and ad blocking – Forbes has been ahead of the curve. Forbes first launched BrandVoice in 2010, a time when only BuzzFeed and Huffington Post had notable sponsored content programs. It sold a majority stake in the company to Hong Kong-based investors in 2014, […]
Magazine publishers need Snapchat, but Snapchat needs them, too. That may be one reason why Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s relatively press-shy CEO, appeared Monday at the American Magazine Media Conference in New York to discuss the origins of Discover and his plans to monetize the platform. Discover, Snapchat’s video magazine product, was created to “remove as […]
Header bidding has been such a runaway hit for publishers that it’s required the development of a new technology to manage all the partners they want to add. What seems a small change – the addition of a wrapper that organizes buyers as they enter the ad server – further solidifies header bidding’s place […]
Wikia unveiled a new property called Fandom this week at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Desert, Calif. The slick-looking site features news articles contributed by readers, as well as bite-size stories designed for social sharing. CEO Craig Palmer described it as “a one-stop shop if you’re a fan of pop culture.” Behind the […]
A singular issue is electrifying the publishers and tech companies attending the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Desert, Calif. IAB CEO Randy Rothenberg came out swinging at ad-blocking firms during his opening speech to members Monday, describing them as an “unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes.” Afterward he continued that discussion with AdExchanger. His […]
OpenX unveiled a new product Tuesday, real-time guaranteed (RTG), with features that fall between private marketplaces and automated guaranteed. The aim is to solve drawbacks to each current buying method. One of the biggest complaints about private marketplaces is that they don’t deliver the scale both sides want. And one of the biggest complaints about […]
SheKnows Media now has $22 million extra to play with, as the result of an expanded credit facility, or loan, it closed with Ally Technology Finance on Monday. The company wants more funds to invest in its technology platform Momentum and to use for shopping. CEO Philippe Guelton said SheKnows Media is “getting ready for […]
