Digital sales platform isocket has named Richard Jalichandra as CEO. John Ramey, who founded isocket four years ago, will step aside but remain with the San Francisco company as its chairman. Jalichandra stepped down as Technorati’s CEO in May 2011 to join Austin-based digital startup MapMyFitness. After that change of pace, Jalichandra, who has remained […]
While the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act registration is at the center of the US government shutdown and has faced criticism over technology glitches this week, healthcare-oriented contextual ad network Precision Health said its expansion into real-time bidding and “audience extension” through AppNexus has gone off without a hitch. Precision Health’s work with AppNexus has […]
California Gov. Jerry Brown set a precedent for privacy rights last week when he signed into law Assembly Bill 370. Under the bill, which amended a section of the California Business and Professions Code, websites that collect personally identifiable information (PII) about California residents must provide a privacy policy that identifies the type of PIIs […]
Interactive ad holding company CPXi is acquiring self-serve ad platform and dynamic creative vendor AdReady to augment its three other units as it works to close the loop around the demand side and the sell side. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. The purchase comes more than a year after two began preliminary […]
Contrary to the image the name conjures, browser plugin Adblock Plus says it’s not out to kill all the ads on the Internet. Company co-founder and CEO Till Faida told AdExchanger that some 61 million people have downloaded Adblock Plus to date, and it sees, on average, 270,000 downloads per day. “There is demand to […]
JetBlue is taking a stab at voice-activated mobile ads with new rich media units that will launch next week. Through the mobile ad network Opera Mediaworks, JetBlue will serve a banner ad to customers with the icon of a microphone and the message, “Click here to learn how to speak pigeon.” When the user clicks […]
Maybe it’s the turbulence that has surrounded Yahoo for the last several years, or maybe it’s reflective of CEO Marissa Mayer’s general worldview, but when asked about the competitive landscape by Charlie Rose during a Q&A at the IAB Mixx conference, she said the portal is more of a potential partner than a challenger to […]
Microsoft is hoping to gain more traction with higher priced, direct sales inventory on its network by striking an agreement with its fellow portals, AOL and Yahoo, to support technical specifications for automating the buying process around reserved ad sales. In other words, Microsoft is joining the push toward “premium programmatic” that AOL trumpeted Monday […]
AOL finally answered the question “What is a programmatic upfront?” by saying it would put its money where its mouth is: starting in 2014, it will make its reserved, guaranteed inventory available through its automated platforms for the first time. The portal lined up an array of advertising partners, noting that five of the six […]
Rocket Fuel is living up to its name in its first hours as a public company. After going public at $29, the high end of its range, the share price more than doubled to $62 by late morning. Since then it has fallen back to $55.50, as of noon EST, a 91% gain. The running […]
A “significant jump” in the number of advertisers tapping into programmatic platforms – 39% of advertisers now take advantage of these technologies – indicates interest is on the upswing on the buy side. According to the Online Advertisers Survey Report 2013 by digital marketing research company Econsultancy in partnership with Rubicon Project, the number of […]
By Kelly Liyakasa, John Ebbert, and Zach Rodgers It’s a big week for the “programmatic IPO.” Rocket Fuel begins trading publicly tomorrow on NASDAQ under the ticker FUEL. French retargeter Criteo meanwhile has filed its F-1, with detailed information about its financials. Since the performance of these two IPOs could set the tone for ad tech […]
In January, lodging chain Motel 6 began beta testing a new display-ad product from IgnitionOne. Called Spot, the tool offers predictive analysis of real-time bidded media placements. While IgnitionOne was primarily known for its remarketing abilities related to search, its general abilities had enough appeal to Motel 6 to put it to work on its wider […]
French retargeting specialist Criteo has been planning its IPO filing for the better part of a year and it’s finally taking the plunge. The company filed an F-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission that details its financial performance and other particulars about its business. The company hopes to raise $190 million from the stock sale, though […]
Rocket Fuel is expected to begin trading this week and has raised the target price for its upcoming IPO to a range of $27 to $29 per share, up from $24 to $27. The late boost may be due to heightened interest from investors in the programmatic ad story — versus the broader ad-tech category. […]
The advertising industry continues to debate privacy issues, including when advertisers may collect information about consumers. Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, has added fuel to the controversy through its experiments with a cookie-blocking patch and a Cookie Clearinghouse—actions that the IAB’s Randall Rothenberg denounced as “arrogant.” Mozilla also announced in a blog post […]
In perhaps the biggest challenge yet to the legitimacy of the Do Not Track standard-making process, the Digital Advertising Alliance is giving up on efforts to build consensus for a browser-based DNT solution for Internet users. The self-regulatory group will also begin its own efforts to initiate a browser-based tracking choice mechanism for Internet users, […]
The major reorg that retiring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer engineered two months ago is resulting in the end of its portal MSN producing original content. As detailed by Romenesko, MSN freelancers were told in a mass email that their services would no longer be needed and that the budget for original content was “zero” for […]
Scale continues to be one of the most challenging aspects of native advertising, and a growing number of companies are working to solve it. As advertisers look for solutions, a number of trends are beginning to emerge, according to a new report from the research firm Altimeter Group. “We’re seeing two fundamental ways that the […]
This story continues our series on programmatic media in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China). Check out our earlier pieces on Brazil and Russia. The final installation, on China, will publish in the coming weeks. India’s growing Internet population would seem to make it a prime market for RTB and programmatic buying. But the […]
AOL and Yahoo – so different, right? Well, not exactly, but they have less in common than they once did. Here’s a crackpot theory for you: The companies are taking different paths in preparation for an eventual megamerger of the sort that was discussed, and then scrapped, back in 2011. Now we’re deep in speculative […]
Ned Brody can officially join Yahoo as SVP for the Americas, five months after resigning his post as CEO of AOL Networks, the unit that houses the company’s ad-tech properties. Brody had been constrained from heading to Yahoo by a noncompete clause, which could have kept him from starting the job until April 2014. But […]
Over the summer, lead generation company Inadco raised an $11 million second round funding, giving it a total of $17 million worth of venture capital since opening its doors five years ago. Much of that time, the Palo Alto company was in stealth mode. That changed roughly two years ago when it sought to position […]
Doing the real-time dirty work for online advertising may not be as sexy as buy side platforms and your favorite late model DMP, but 50-person strong Aerospike doesn’t mind. In fact, many ad tech companies including AppNexus, BlueKai and eXelate use Aerospike’s database product to fuel real-time, big data interactions. Today, the company announced (see […]
Now and then the question comes up. How vulnerable is the digital ad ecosystem to the technical problems that occasionally knock out trading in the major financial markets? One such glitch hit Nasdaq on Thursday, freezing out investors for three hours. Time to revisit! Once the preferred way of explaining RTB to one’s relatives, the “financial […]
“Native advertising” is a projection of publisher desires to revamp traditional print advertorials. Advertisers, too, like the idea of doing something unique that dovetails with editorial content and looks good across devices without requiring three creative versions. But scalability remains an issue. Ad-tech provider Appssavvy is one of several players looking for ways to combine the […]
With Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer planning to retire inside of a year, the question from an ad tech perspective is: could Microsoft return to an ad stack strategy with a new CEO? And if so, who would it be? Today, Microsoft’s ad tech/stack strategy largely consists of an hypnotic focus on search advertising through Bing, […]
eMarketer is estimating marketers will spend $3.34 billion on real time-bidded ads this year, representing a 73.9% increase from last year and a slight upward revision of an earlier estimate. The researcher previously projected $3.32 billion in spend this year on RTB, due to “upward revisions in the overall digital display ad market.” Additionally, by 2017, RTB […]
It’s been six months since botnets entered the advertising lexicon in a big way, thanks to research and publicity efforts by self-styled fraud fighters and firms that specialize in detecting nonhuman traffic. March stories in Adweek, AdExchanger and other publications shined a spotlight on the pervasiveness of nonhuman Internet traffic and its threat to the value […]
Given the recent IPO and M&A frenzy, it should come as no surprise that some ad-tech players saw strong revenue growth in 2012, as reported today in the Inc. 500/5000 list. But even keen observers might be impressed by the surges at some data-management providers, in particular DataXu (ranked No. 5 among the entire list with […]
