In the past two weeks, the European Union has further expanded the scope of its regulatory powers and revealed more zealous plans to influence competition between digital properties. In late August, the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) released net neutrality guidelines, which become law in 2018, that forbid practices like “fast lanes” […]
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 […]
Peter Horst will speak at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference in Chicago on September 8. After decades of focus on TV and print advertising, Hershey’s is “in the early stages of a long, judicious process of building out a data operation and translating our brands to a digital mindset,” according to CMO Peter Horst. AdExchanger spoke with Horst about […]
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 […]
Facebook introduced a page-loading protocol on Tuesday that makes its ads almost indistinguishable from Facebook content, and thus prevents ad blockers from working on its site. Andrew Bosworth, the social media company’s VP of ads and business platform, said the change forces ad blockers to choose between not blocking ads or severely undermining the user […]
While “programmatic technology” has come a long way, many longtime players in the space are now reckoning with the term. AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley penned op eds about the “death of programmatic.” Rubicon Project SVP of market development Jay Sears also has acknowledged the limitations of the terminology. AdExchanger reached out to ad tech executives, some […]
On Saturday, small businesses will get a chance to pitch ideas to a GoDaddy executive and other experts at the SheKnows Media conference. To drive viewers to the live-streamed event, GoDaddy will become the first brand to deploy a programmatic video live-stream ad unit from Traction Labs. The session is part of a sponsorship deal […]
Google parent Alphabet finished out Q2 2016 with $21.5 billion in overall revenue, a 21% jump from Q2 2015. It’s also a notable acceleration of growth rate from that year-ago quarter, when top line revenue grew 11%. [Read the earnings release.] The company chalked up the faster growth to investments in mobile and video. “The strength of the quarter […]
Despite similar origins as Web 1.0 content portals, Yahoo’s inability to shake its roots and AOL’s decisive transformation into an ad tech company sent the two down starkly different paths, even as they both landed beneath Verizon’s big red checkmark: the communications giant purchased AOL for $4.4 billion last May and revealed its intention to […]
It’s easy to forget, but Yahoo was once the largest and most promising digital media company – its stock a bellwether for the internet sector as a whole. By Q1 2017, regulatory hurdles permitting, that stock will stop trading as the company’s people, its portfolio of brands and its technology assets are absorbed into Verizon. To honor Yahoo’s important role in […]
It’s probably not a good idea to use Google Translate on legal language. Roughly two weeks ago, the Chinese government released online regulations that include new rules governing paid search results, embedded links, video ads and email advertising. A buried clause within the edict also seems to outlaw ad blocking – and when Adblock Plus realized […]
Nielsen has entered into an open marriage with three viewability providers. The company will now support Integral Ad Science, Moat and DoubleVerify within its digital audience measurement solution, Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings. Although it had a preexisting relationship with Integral Ad Science since 2012, clients have requested support for alternative providers that fit their preferences. […]
Political ad dollars, even more so than brand budgets, have conglomerated around a handful of major players. Of the more than $1 billion analysts predict candidates and super PACs will spend online this election, “half will go to Facebook and Google, Pandora – those are the big ones – and Twitter,” said Jordan Lieberman, politics […]
The European Union’s antitrust commission on Thursday added two formal charges to Google’s ever-growing pile of regulatory burdens. The first charge substantiates a previous objection claiming Google favors its own comparison shopping service in search results. “It means consumers may not see the most relevant results to their search queries,” wrote European Commissioner for Competition […]
Congress is starting to pay attention to ad fraud – and it’s looking to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for answers. To be precise, Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) drafted a letter to the FTC on Monday calling for the commission to take a closer look at the negative economic impact of digital […]
For many in the native space, the always-on-the-horizon prospect of the Promised Land has been a hard sell to other digital stakeholders. And though the industry has grown at a rapid clip, there’s still deep confusion over questions as basic and crucial as “What is native?” Native is “a broad term that lacks definition,” said […]
The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) on Tuesday issued an impassioned rejection of the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) proposed change to online privacy and data security regulations. Wednesday is the final day of the public comment period before the FCC deliberates on the policy, which would force marketers to ask for permission to track consumers’ […]
Let the data mingling commence! Google is going to start storing Chrome and Google app browsing history alongside an individual’s Google account information, which catalogs what you watch on YouTube and what you search for. The internet giant previously siloed those two types of information, and now that they’re coming together that data could eventually […]
Britain is leaving the European Union. Though the process will take up to two years, the news sent agency stocks tumbling. What everyone wants to know, but can only make educated guesses about, is how this will affect the digital advertising industry. AdExchanger asked a few digital executives to take a gander at how this […]
Kohler is looking to do more than just sell plumbing supplies and it’s using content to get there. The goal is to help prospective customers, anyone from an individual homeowner to an interior designer, envision how a new piece of hardware will fit into the home of their dreams. In the pre-digital era, Kohler showcased […]
The British mobile carrier Three Group on Wednesday began a 24-hour trial of the network-level ad-blocking blueprint it’s been working on since earlier this year. Three deploys its ad blocking through a partnership with the Israeli startup Shine, which installs ad-block tech on telco networks and facilitates new opt-in advertising arrangements between mobile providers and […]
Kelly Liyakasa contributed. What a month for Facebook’s ad business. Late Thursday and early Friday, Facebook signaled plans to serve more ads to nonusers on its Facebook Audience Network (FAN). The company also moved to shutter two other ad tech components: its LiveRail exchange (parts of which had already been sunsetted) and its Facebook Exchange […]
Optimizing a programmatic ad stack today involves constant manual adjustments. More demand? Move floor prices up. Less demand? Dial them back down. It’s pesky work for ad ops teams. “We want to mediate that mess for publishers,” said Sortable founder and CEO Chris Reid. Sortable boosts a publisher’s revenue by deciding which price floors, ad […]
Ari Bluman, a highly-regarded digital media exec whose passion was only rivaled by his bluntness, has passed away after a long fight with cancer. He was 44. To those who knew him, Bluman was a “man of conviction” who “lived his beliefs” and practiced “radical candor” in order to “improve the industry he loved and […]
The long-rumored demise of Facebook’s desktop FBX will finally arrive. The social media giant will shut off its desktop retargeting tool Nov. 1. Partners buying through the FBX API will have to use a different one, said Matt Idema, Facebook’s VP of product monetization. Current partners include AppNexus, Criteo, AdRoll and MediaMath, among others. “FBX […]
The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) took the wraps off of its anti-fraud certification program on Monday, the culmination of more than a year and a half of foundation and coalition building. The program allows members of the digital supply chain – buyers, sellers and third parties – to earn a seal in exchange for proving […]
More than half of US advertisers are unaware they’re buying “sourced” publisher traffic that may be riddled with bots and fraud, according to a study released Tuesday by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). Sixty-one percent of advertisers are either “slightly familiar” or “not familiar at all” with sourced traffic. Only 5% of advertisers surveyed […]
To know your enemy, you must become your enemy. That could be one way to view Google’s rumored entrance into the world of ad blocking. Recent buzz has centered on Google spearheading an industrywide initiative that sounds a heck of a lot like an acceptable ads program, taking an unexpected page from the Adblock Plus […]
Whether or not Ghostery is an ad blocker depends on how you define “ad blocker.” Also depends on who you ask. It’s an awkward question for a company that wears two seemingly different hats in the online ad industry. The first is as one of two primary privacy compliance technology providers powering the Digital Advertising […]
If Rocket Fuel successfully escapes the gravitational pull of Desert Planet Ad Network and lands on the verdant fields of Planet Software Platform, its agency relationships will have played a key role. Thus far, Rocket Fuel has had success building relationships with international agencies and independent North American agencies, said CEO Randy Wootton during the […]
