Snap is super focused on improving its average revenue per user (ARPU) this year. Snap’s ARPU for North America is growing – up 31% year over year (YoY) in the fourth quarter of 2019 – but at $4.42, it still significantly lags Facebook’s, which topped $41 in Q4. On Tuesday, chief business officer Jeremi Gorman outlined […]
Amazon is the ultimate bottom-of-the-funnel play for brands. But the company sees big opportunities to expand into branding. “I don’t think we do a good enough job of allowing brands to have a recreational and ongoing conversation with consumers,” said Colleen Aubrey, VP of performance advertising at Amazon, at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview in New York […]
Remember those “ad targeting-related headwinds” Facebook keeps talking about every quarter? They’re finally going to hit this year. Facebook experienced some effects in 2019 from global privacy regulations, privacy-focused changes made by mobile operating systems and browsers (Google did a thing) and its own privacy product rollouts. However, “the majority of the impact lies in […]
OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan is leaving after 12 years to become CEO of GoFundMe. OpenX President John Gentry, a seven-year vet at the company, will step into the CEO role. “I’ve been walking in this direction for a long time,” Cadogan said. “It’s been a quarter of my life.” He said he told the board […]
Google GM and VP of apps, video and display Sissie Hsiao will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference in New York on Jan. 28-29, 2020. Google is known for making methodical changes with long roll-out periods. But Sissie Hsiao, who became general manager and VP of Google’s advertising business across apps, video and display in […]
As the streaming wars intensify, NBCUniversal on Thursday sought to draw a clear distinction between the soon-to-be-launched Peacock and its streaming and digital competitors. Peacock will debut with 10 ad experiences that emphasize interactivity and performance, the company revealed during an investor day in New York City. It will run just five minutes of ads […]
When Nielsen CEO David Kenny stepped into the top role at the end of 2018, the company was embattled on multiple fronts. Viewers were shifting to streaming TV, which Nielsen struggled to measure. Nielsen’s media customers, frustrated with the company’s slow pace of innovation, started moving away from its measurement services. NBCUniversal, for example, spearheaded […]
Running a programmatic exchange requires PubMatic to process around 800 billion bids a day and 80 million bids a second – which generates 100 terabytes of compressed data per day. And this number has only risen as header bidding multiplies the number of daily bid requests. Data analysis in real time instead of a day […]
Data management platforms (DMPs) were once painted as a panacea for all of a marketer’s data needs – from collection, to harmonization to segmentation and syndication. But marketers have since cooled on the technology, concluding that it‘s too disjointed to perform many of the functions promised. Marketers tell AdExchanger they have struggled to achieve ROI, […]
Acquia said Wednesday it has acquired customer data platform AgilOne for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition is Acquia’s third this year and its fifth in two years. The company wants to build a “digital experience platform.” “There are so many siloed marketing technologies today,” Acquia CEO Mike Sullivan said. “Communication across channels is not coordinated, […]
Verizon Media, the telco giant’s ad tech and content unit, added digital out-of-home (DOOH) supply to its SSP on Tuesday. The SSP launch completes Verizon’s full-stack DOOH offering, having launched a DSP solution for outdoor media buys earlier this year. Verizon also has a network called Verizon Digital Signage, a collection of 3,000 interactive screens […]
As it prepares for an IPO, Sprinklr made its 12th acquisition Tuesday with the purchase of Nanigans’ performance advertising business for an undisclosed price. Sprinklr will completely absorb Nanigans into its “front office platform,” and it will no longer be available as stand-alone offering. Beyond paid media, Sprinklr connects mar tech to ad tech with […]
When Facebook, Google or Instagram approve of an engagement-boosting tactic, they usually describe it with positive words, such as “organic” or “authentic.” Tactics they forbid, however – generally unilaterally and sometimes without warning – are characterized as “unnatural” and whoever uses them is a “schemer” or an “offender.” Most news articles covering these guideline changes unquestioningly adopt […]
Most agencies are myopic in their approach to Amazon. They might only focus on retail optimization or just concentrate on search. But Amazon also offers an array of opportunities across OTT, audio, social and branding, said Travis Johnson, global CEO of Amazon consultancy Podean. “What Amazon is doing is very broad, [and] nobody is thinking […]
Three auction clearinghouses have come to dominate digital advertising: Prebid, Google open bidding (formerly known as exchange bidding) and Amazon Publisher Services’ Transparent Ad Marketplace (TAM). With the rise of header bidding, publishers needed a way to have multiple exchanges bid against each other in real time. Prebid launched in 2015 as an independent and […]
Facebook is allowing advertisers to whitelist content as part of an overall improvement to the brand-safety controls on the platform. Brands can use the controls, still in alpha, to create whitelists of publishers for in-stream video and Facebook Audience Network. “Whitelists have been a request for advertisers for some time,” said Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s VP […]
If Instagram permanently removes public likes – a test that went global Thursday – it will greatly impact the influencer marketing industry by forcing influencers to embrace more sophisticated marketing metrics. Marketers will push even harder to evaluate influencers based on clicks, view-through rates and swipe-up engagements with stories, said Daniel Schotland, chief operating officer […]
Amazon introduced a new way for its cloud customers to buy and use third-party data with the launch of the AWS Data Exchange on Thursday. There are about 90 data companies as launch partners, including PlaceIQ, Epsilon, Acxiom and Foursquare. Unlike data marketplaces such as those operated by The Trade Desk, Oracle or LiveRamp, the […]
There’s a reason Facebook doesn’t provide granular brand safety controls for news feed – it doesn’t think they’re necessary. “We don’t believe ad adjacency matters in certain environments … and we designed the platform with that in mind,” said Erik Geisler, Facebook’s director of North American agency partnerships, speaking Thursday at 614 Group’s Brand Safety Summit […]
Though new to advertising, the video app TikTok is learning from competitors’ mistakes to forge strong relationships with buyers and to build a clear sales pitch. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snap, which focused on audience growth over advertising opportunities at first, TikTok understood early on how to successfully work with media buyers. Facebook and […]
Buyers increasingly want transparency into their programmatic buying. But undertaking the project of requesting log-level data from exchanges themselves requires resources many brands don’t have. Lucidity wants to be the tech solution to demystify and audit the programmatic supply chain. Lucidity stitches together information from the buyer’s ad server (where it inserts its own pixel), […]
Facebook seems to exist within two alternate realities: The one in which it’s battered almost daily by a relentlessly negative news cycle, and the one in which advertisers, particularly performance marketers, never seem to put away their checkbooks. That second reality could be under threat. Facebook has been sounding the warning on privacy-related “ad targeting […]
DoubleVerify purchased Ad-Juster for an undisclosed amount Thursday in an all-cash, all-stock offer. The analytics platform gives publishers a stitched-together view of their programmatic ad performance. “A lot of our work today is with advertisers to maximize their quality and performance,” said DoubleVerify CEO Wayne Gattinella. “Ad-Juster extends our platform to the supply side.” Ad-Juster […]
Rubicon Project missed revenue projections for the quarter as programmatic changes, including the new transparency standards App.ads.txt and sellers.json, affected its topline revenue growth. Rubicon Project’s Q3 revenue grew 27% year over year to $37.6 million. Year to date, its revenues are $107.9 million, which represents 30% growth compared to the same period last year. […]
Content is king. And great content gets readers to sign up. The content analytics company Parse.ly has long captivated publishers with its intuitive dashboard to track how articles perform. In October, the 10-year-old company added functionality that tracks conversions. Parse.ly clients can now analyze the type of content people read before they convert. Then they […]
Google is taking advantage of all the product discovery happening on YouTube. The company said on Tuesday that advertisers buying Shopping Ads can extend their campaigns so those ads show up on YouTube’s home page and search feed. Google first let marketers use its search data to inform YouTube targeting back in 2017. User behavior, […]
Over the last year and a half, Facebook has been embroiled in so many controversial issues, it’s hard to keep track: privacy problems, the spread of misinformation, election interference, improperly secured data, antitrust concerns and, most recently, Facebook’s policy on paid political advertising, which is rubbing nearly everyone, including some of Facebook’s own employees, the […]
Facebook’s ongoing PR nightmare didn’t impact its quarterly earnings – yet again. On Wednesday, Facebook reported $17.7 billion in revenue for the third quarter, up 28.6% year over year, beating the consensus by a cool $300 million. The company’s stock rose nearly 5% in after-hours trading. Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the earnings call with a […]
On the menu in Washington, DC, today: Mark Zuckerberg, served skewered and moderately grilled by House reps during a hearing on Facebook’s impact on the financial services and housing sectors. Most of the questions he faced were skeptical queries about the potential pitfalls of Facebook’s attempted foray into cryptocurrency with Libra, which Rep. Brad Sherman, […]
Rubicon Project acquired header bidding management and analytics platform RTK.io for $11 million in cash on Monday. The plan is to integrate RTK.io’s tech and analytics functionality into Rubicon Project’s Demand Manager product by the first half of next year. “This will accelerate our vision to be a leader in the Prebid managed service business,” […]
