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 idea behind Ads.txt was simple: publishers create a public list containing the names of all the partners they work with, and buyers check that list before they buy. But even the simplest of ideas can get complicated when they go from paper to reality. Some publishers just said “yes” to every request to add […]
The Trade Desk beat its own expectations for Q1, but Wall Street wasn’t pleased. The stock is currently tumbling, down more than 25% in the hours after the earnings call. The Trade Desk reported revenue of $219.8 million and adjusted EBITDA of $70.5 million, which is 32% of revenue. The company said its adjusted EBITDA […]
Digital ad tech companies are making their play to control advertising on CTV. But it’s not easy to become a star of the big screen. Ad tech companies that make it big in CTV must earn their spot in a few ways. First, they must understand the supply constraints of CTV and find their niche. […]
Amazon’s “other” segment, which houses its advertising business, grew 73% YoY to $6.9 billion in Q1. “The advertising team has done a great job turning clicks into productive sales, and the advertising that results is valuable to us as well,” said Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky. While Amazon’s ads business grew due to traffic increases, its […]
One year after the pandemic led to a sharp fall in Alphabet’s ad spending, the company’s Q1 2020 ad revenue has more than rebounded, sending the stock upwards in after-hours trading. Alphabet revenue grew 34% in Q1 to $55.3 billion. The amount Google paid out to its partners (or traffic acquisition costs) trailed revenue, growing […]
Despite widespread DSP consolidation, some buyers still find their needs aren’t being served. So IPONWEB developed Bidcore, a customizable DSP for buyers with unusual needs or use cases, and who don’t want to optimize around CPA, click-through rate or viewability. In the past, ad tech companies would have asked IPONWEB to build them a white […]
Zeta Global filed its S-1 paperwork Monday. Zeta has not yet determined the number of shares it will offer or the price. Zeta – whose offering combines marketing tech, ad tech and data services – reported $368.1 million in 2020 revenue, a 20.3% increase from the year before. Adjusted EBITDA was $39.6 million, up 62.7% […]
The third-party cookie is halfway out the door, so CafeMedia is already ushering in its replacement: email-based IDs. The ad management firm started working with LiveRamp ATS (Authenticated Traffic Solution) eight months ago. ATS scrambles an email address and puts the user’s identity in a secure envelope for SSPs to open and resolve. Buyers then […]
Hive, which supplies AI-based contextual and measurement technology to media and ad tech companies, said Wednesday it raised $85 million in funding, valuing the company at over $2 billion. The company has raised $121 million in total. Hive has raised a lot in the past year. It closed a $50 million Series D round earlier […]
When the ad tech company Minute Media acquired the publication Players’ Tribune in 2019, the deal underscored how consolidation is creating unlikely portfolios. “For years, we thought it would be difficult long term to be a standalone publisher, which was why we focused on being a standalone tech platform,” said Asaf Peled, CEO of Minute […]
The Gist co-founder Ellen Hyslop believes women care about sports news – they just don’t care for the way it’s presented. When Hyslop captivated her friends with her account of the Toronto Maple Leafs making it to the NHL playoffs, they all realized they had stumbled onto a winning idea. More women deserved to hear […]
If addressability and cross-platform are the two most important TV buzzwords today, FreeWheel’s latest pilot is killing two birds with one stone. Comcast and Charter are using FreeWheel tech to chop up linear TV ad spots to make it “audience addressable,” across both linear and digital. Instead of the same ad being shown to all […]
Google’s lack of transparency has long frustrated publishers and independent ad tech companies, and its clandestine program “Project Bernanke” has only confirmed their suspicions that Google uses learnings from its auction to benefit itself. Ad tech insiders met the allegations that Google secretly fed publisher ad server data into its buying systems to gain market […]
The third-party cookie may be going away, 80 identity solutions are vying to fill that void, according to analysis by marketing trade group MMA Global and Prohaska Consulting. Even the savviest CMOs have difficulty keeping up with the different identity reconstruction options, said CEO Greg Stuart. “We are at a neophyte level,” he said. Naming […]
How to manage the tradeoff between personalized advertising and privacy is a familiar debate. Whether personalized advertising – or advertising, full stop – works is a less common direction. But in a debate organized by Facebook (surprise!) between IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg and “Subprime Attention Crisis” author Tim Hwang, Hwang challenged the widely accepted notion […]
Internet advertising made a huge rebound in Q4, growing 29% YoY to $45.6 billion, according to the 2020 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report. “Q4 was the best quarter we have ever seen in 20 years,” said David Cohen, president of the IAB. Overall online advertising in 2020 grew 12% YoY to $140 billion. “The fact […]
Marketers can build better customer experiences if they can find their customers as they pop up in different parts of their buying journey – visiting the website, buying a product in an Instagram story, viewing an ad or seeking customer support. To enable this visibility, LiveRamp built a native connection into Google Cloud Platform. Previously, […]
One reason performance advertisers love search advertising is because they can easily see the return on their ad investment. Based on that insight, Jason Fairchild co-founded tvScientific and raised $1.5 million in seed funding from prominent names in ad tech and search advertising. The platform aims to deterministically link someone seeing a commercial to that […]
Seven ad tech companies made transactions valued at over $1 billion in the first quarter of 2021 – double the amount that’s happened in the past few years combined. “We’ve got a perfect storm here of different forces lining up, which created such a strong quarter,” said Conor McKenna, LUMA Partners director. The ad tech […]
Publications like Scary Mommy, Fatherly and The Dad speak to the joys and insecurities of being a parent. These brands have created enviable engagement with their community of moms and dads, that span across platforms: email, websites and both old social media sites (Facebook) and new (Twitch). “You can’t ask for a healthier media company,” […]
The end of the third-party cookie won’t happen for nearly a year, but thanks to GDPR, Axel Springer was prepared for the shift: the publisher hasn’t used third-party data in the ad campaigns it sells since the end of 2018. Instead, it’s shored up its technology, working to create scalable first-party data. The German news […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. What’s one way to combat subscription fatigue? Create a bundle. “Our view is that what Apple has done, what Netflix has done, we want to do in the active lifestyle category,” said Outside CEO Robin Thurston. In February, the […]
TikTok offers fertile ground to build a media brand. Ten weeks after launching on TikTok, fashion-focused media brand Rag Report is posting twice a day and seeing its audience grow 200% each week. The Wednesday I scheduled the interview, it had 170,000 followers. But by the time we spoke, the numbers were already out of […]
Even though The Weather Channel’s advertising business remained strong during the pandemic, relying on advertising alone is risky for a media company, even one that specializes in unique data and tech. “We’re at an inflection point. With all the changes happening in advertising with privacy, and identifiers and cookies being eliminated by the big tech […]
When BuzzFeed ramped up its affiliate business recently, one group of products consistently popped up in its top ten: sex toys. Though some might blush, BuzzFeed was proud of its nuanced, sex-positive coverage of sex toy product recommendations. BuzzFeed wasn’t trying to sensationalize, but to be inclusive of all sexual orientations and body types in […]
Food52 is taking the lid off its first-party data platform. The hybrid publisher-retailer concluded it needed to improve ad buyers’ access to its data, said Matt Greenberg, SVP of brand partnerships at Food52. Advertisers were asking Food52 about its data, so the demand was already there. And publishers are building first-party data solutions left and […]
What’s a gym CMO to do when gyms – which normally promote health – get banned for health reasons? That’s exactly the situation Blink Fitness CMO Michelle Horowitz found herself in during the pandemic. The fitness chain operates 110 gyms across 10 states, all of which had different rules about gym openings. Blink Fitness hustled […]
Google drew a line in the sand on March 3rd, when it said it wouldn’t build or support cross-site identifiers. But single-site identifiers, specific to an individual publisher, are fair game – and something Google wants to encourage. To that end, Google is dusting off an old/new ID type: the publisher provided identifier (PPID) in […]
GroupM wants to move from using 40 to 50 supply partners globally to five to six partners. As part of that push to consolidate its programmatic supply chain, it struck a global deal with the SSP PubMatic. “We want to use our scale effectively to help clients,” said Andrew Meaden, global head of investment at […]
The majority of BuzzFeed’s ad deals – 65% – now use its first-party data to target ads. And the publisher also provides data matching, insights and optimization powered by data from its 104 million monthly users. To make these data capabilities easier for advertisers to access, BuzzFeed is collecting them into one product, dubbed Lighthouse. […]
