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Zach Rodgers

Zach Rodgers

Executive Editor

Zach runs AdExchanger’s editorial operations and supports programming strategy for AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO and Industry Preview events. Under his leadership the publication was recognized with a Jesse H. Neal Award in the category of “Best Media Brand” in 2016 and two regional Azbee Awards for “Best Technical Article” in 2017. He was previously Managing Editor at ClickZ, and his work has been published in The Guardian, Mashable and elsewhere.​ He is the host of AdExchanger Talks, a podcast featuring key leaders in the media, marketing and advertising technology arena. He frequently moderates at industry events. ​

Articles By Zach

  • How Facebook's Expulsion Of HasOffers Went Down

    For a mobile ad startup, getting kicked off Facebook’s platform is pretty much the worst-case scenario. As reported by AdExchanger last week, this nightmare recently became reality for two companies, HasOffers and Kontagent, who were found to have violated data collection policies and were removed from Facebook’s mobile measurement partner (MMP) program. The rejection of […]

  • Facebook Drops Two Mobile Ad Partners For Keeping Data Too Long

    Facebook has cut two partners from its mobile ad measurement program for failing to honor its policies around data retention and disclosure, AdExchanger has learned. The companies, HasOffers and Kontagent, violated their agreements with Facebook, including holding onto data longer than their contracts allowed and failing to require their advertisers  — app developers — to […]

  • Primed For IPO, PubMatic Shifts Gears On Marketing

    It’s a tumultuous time for the usually staid ad-tech subsector of sell-side platforms (SSPs). As The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday (registration required), PubMatic will chase direct competitor Rubicon Project into the public markets, seeking a valuation of more than $1 billion. Additionally, PubMatic has replaced its top marketer, Larry Harris, with Razorfish and […]

  • NYT Gears Up For 'Critical Year' In Its Advertising Story

    2014 will be a “critical year in the story of advertising” at The New York Times Co., CEO Mark Thompson said during the company’s Q4 2013 earnings call today. It’s a story that will play out in ad tech, native ads, mobile formats and video. “In 2014, we will apply greater focus to mobile monetization, […]

  • Twitter Q4 Ad Revenue Balloons to $220M, But User Engagement Flags

    Twitter’s first quarter as a public company was hot and cold. Ad performance was the hot part. Q4 2013 ad revenue on the Twitter platform grew 121% to $220 million, of which mobile advertising accounted for more than 75%. The MoPub mobile ad exchange, acquired during the quarter, delivered $8 million in revenue. Audience trends […]

  • How Rubicon's Financials Stack Up Against Other Programmatic IPOs

    Rubicon Project’s Tuesday IPO filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was a widely anticipated moment of financial transparency for the sell-side platform (SSP), but it wasn’t the first programmatic player to initiate a public offering. Rocket Fuel and Criteo both went public last fall, creating an interesting point of comparison for Rubicon […]

  • Xaxis Buys Dutch Ad Net BannerConnect

    WPP Group’s addressable media unit, Xaxis, has acquired Netherlands-based BannerConnect, a 10-year-old company that evolved from its roots as a traditional publisher network to embrace the exchange-buying trend. BannerConnect has headquarters in Sittard and satellite offices in London and Amsterdam. In addition to bringing on the 40 employees in those locations, Xaxis gets technologies for […]

  • Online-To-Offline Data Firm Korrelate Is Shutting Down

    Korrelate, a four-year-old data play founded by former executives of Tacoda, will suspend operations this week after failing to find a buyer. The company was born in 2010 as Ad Summos with a pledge to help publishers link their website visitors to real-world actions – such as buying a car. It was among the early […]

  • Talking With VivaKi AOD's New President, Stephan Beringer

    Stephan Beringer is in for a ride. Earlier this week Beringer was named president of Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi Audience On Demand (AOD) trading desk. He succeeds Kurt Unkel, a respected agency leader and progenitor of the trading desk idea, who will exit at the end of February for a hometown job as chief digital officer […]

  • Facebook's Q4: Mobile Ad Revenues Surpass Desktop

    In Q4 2013, Facebook for the first time derived more than half of its ad revenue from impressions served to mobile devices. Mobile ad revenues were $1.2 billion, 53 percent of the overall $2.3 billion in ad revenue it garnered for the period, the company reported Wednesday. It’s a significant milestone for the company, which has long […]

  • Adobe Social Index: Facebook CPMs Spike, Competitors Gain On Retail Metrics

    Facebook CPM-based ad prices jumped more than 400% in Q4 2013, according to some 240 billion impressions analyzed in Adobe’s Q4 2013 Social Media Intelligence Report. However the holiday season delivered “warning signs” for Facebook in the form of tepid growth in the visits and revenue it’s driving to retail sites, relative to some of […]

  • VivaKi's Kurt Unkel Moves On To Team Detroit

    Kurt Unkel is stepping down from VivaKi Audience On Demand (AOD), where he has for the past five years been a key figure in evolving Publicis Groupe’s entry in the trading desk space. Adweek’s Noreen O’Leary first reported the news earlier today, noting Unkel has accepted the chief digital officer role at WPP’s Ford agency, […]

  • P&G Shifts More Ad Spend To Addressable Digital Channels

    The world’s biggest advertiser wants more targeting. According to comments made Friday by Chief Financial Officer Jon Moeller, Procter & Gamble (P&G) has seized the audience segmentation opportunities presented by mobile, social and other digital media. Meanwhile the relatively weak targeting of the TV channel has stripped away some of its appeal, he said. “[Digital […]

  • In Speech, Obama Conflates Ad Tracking With NSA Spying

    In a speech Friday on proposed changes to the government’s spying program, President Barack Obama briefly linked the National Security Agency’s (NSA) domestic and foreign surveillance activities to digital ad tracking common in the marketing world. According to the speech transcript, Obama said of his intelligence review: “There was a recognition by all who participated […]

  • Razorfish Media Keeps Showing Up

    You’ve got to hand it to Razorfish for even having a media practice. Considering the clout of corporate siblings like Starcom Mediavest Group (SMG) and the growing power of media agencies in general, it would not be surprising to learn that – four years after its acquisition by Publicis Groupe — the digital agency’s media […]

  • Evidon's Challenge: Getting Ghostery Into The Hands Of More Users

    As we noted last week, Evidon has redoubled its efforts to turn the 20 million users of its Ghostery browser plugin into a larger revenue stream. Execs have decided the tag-monitoring browser extension holds potential as a pixel analytics panel, and they aim to promote this crowd-sourced analytics capability to enterprise marketers to audit their site […]

  • Twitter Rolls Out CRM Matching, 'Twitter ID' Targeting

    Twitter has rolled out two new prongs to its “Tailored Audiences” targeting regime, which debuted last month as a vehicle strictly for website retargeting. Among the new segmenting features are CRM matching and Twitter ID targeting. The latter allows the serving of ads based on a user’s public characteristics, such as keywords appearing in a […]

  • Turn Confirms New $80M Round

    As we first reported in November, digital marketing software firm Turn has reeled in a new Series E investment. The $80 million raise was distributed among eight venture capital firms and brings Turn’s total funding to about $138 million to date. (For comparison, direct competitor MediaMath has raised a mere $24.4 million, according to CrunchBase). […]

  • Evidon Taps Emily Riley To Package Ghostery Data For Enterprise Clients

    Evidon wants to better monetize the data waterfall pouring from its network of 20 million Ghostery users, and will look to new Chief Operating Officer Emily Riley to help it pull that off. Riley, a longtime Forrester analyst who spent the last year driving Audience Science’s pivot from an ad network into a data intelligence […]

  • Belk Taps Accenture To Integrate Physical, Digital Retail Experiences

    In a sign of the growing incursion consulting firms have made on terrain once held by digital agencies, retailer Belk has tapped management consultancy Accenture to execute its push into cross-channel selling. The consulting firm was chosen from a field of 10 suitors to support the North Carolina-based department store chain’s five-year, $200 million “omni-channel […]

  • Marchex Stages A Comeback

    Beginning about a decade ago, Seattle-based Marchex made a flurry of acquisitions in several digital marketing categories, and then floundered. The company was diversified but undifferentiated, as President Peter Christothoulou describes it. It ran side businesses selling domains, driving leads and publishing a tech vertical through the 2005 acquisition of Industry Brains (recently sold to […]

  • 2013 M&A: More Big Deals, And A Flood Of Marketing Tech

    Although marketing industry deal activity was flat in 2013, the sector saw some eye-popping deal sizes, according to boutique investment bank Jordan, Edmiston Group Inc.’s (JEGI) annual review of mergers and acquisitions. In 2012, many of the biggest deals in 2012 tracked by JEGI involved consumer brands (Yahoo, Kayak), with only two marketing industry mergers coming in […]

  • eBay Heyday: Inside Retailer's Data-Enhanced Media Business

    Ever more companies on the buy side want to partner directly with publishers. Sell-side platforms (SSPs), ad networks, agencies, demand-side platforms (DSPs), retargeting networks and others have over the last year increased their efforts to gain visibility and direct inventory access. In a recent telling example, WPP Group’s Xaxis programmatic platform absorbed 24/7 Media to […]

  • Sprint VP Digital Scott Zalaznik: 2014 Will Be Year Of 'Connecting Dots'

    It’s that time of year. To get a sense of what’s coming in 2014, we reached out to some senior marketers with a single, open-ended question about the coming year. “What new consumer or technology trend do you expect to see in 2014 that will change your marketing strategy?” The below response is from Scott […]

  • Gilt.com’s 2014 Crystal Ball: Personalization Will Drive Email And Social Channels

    It’s that time of year. To get a sense of what’s coming in 2014, we asked some senior marketers to answer a single, open-ended question about the coming year: “What new consumer or technology trend do you expect to see in 2014 that will change your marketing strategy?” The below response is from Tamara Gruzbarg, […]

  • China Holding Company BlueFocus Goes West, Buys London's We Are Social

    Beijing-based BlueFocus Communications has bought a majority stake in We Are Social, strengthening its Western presence and gaining a global social marketing capability. Under the deal terms, BlueFocus paid an initial $30 million for an 82.8 percent position in We Are Social, with additional incentive-based compensation doled out over the next three years. London-based We Are […]

  • Facebook Debuts Auto-Play Video Ads: Big Audience, Broad Targeting

    It took the better part of a year, but Facebook has overcome its internal angst about “motion” in the News Feed with the debut of cross-channel, auto-play video ads. The offering (officially in beta) instantly creates the largest digital video buy ever, with potential daily reach covering nearly half the U.S. population. Mindshare purchased the […]

  • Xaxis's Mark Grether: 2014 Will Bring Video, Sequential Messaging To Programmatic Buys

    Late last year, we asked a handful of senior execs at platform companies to answer the question, “What will happen next year in marketing and advertising that hasn’t happened before?” This year we invited some of those same contributors to evaluate their earlier forecasts and update them for 2014. The below is from Mark Grether, chief […]

  • Salesforce's Michael Lazerow: Connected Products Will Change Marketing In 2014

    Last year we asked a handful of senior execs at platform companies to answer the question, “What will happen next year in marketing and advertising that hasn’t happened before?” This year we invited some of those contributors to evaluate their earlier forecasts and update them for 2014. The below is from Michael Lazerow, chief marketing […]

  • Scrappy Cloud Player SHIFT Raises $6M For Euro Expansion

    You can’t throw a 23-year-old media buyer without hitting a software “cloud.” One of the precocious contenders in this bunch, social-centric SHIFT, has raised $6 million to support an expansion of its Open Marketing Cloud into Europe. The investment, led by DN Capital, brings its total financing to $14 million. The company’s 29-year-old CEO, James […]

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