How does a smaller DSP survive, as the largest buying platforms command more of the marketplace? For Dstillery, the answer is to become a data company. Dstillery officially shut down its bidder and stopped operating a DSP on July 1. Its focus now is selling custom audience segments through the buyer’s DSP of choice. Since […]
The Trade Desk and Google are locking horns on pending industry specifications designed to bring transparency to programmatic buying. Why? The Trade Desk, rather than Google, is the one throwing its weight around for a change. As one of the originators of the Open RTB SupplyChain object spec, The Trade Desk has been gunning to […]
Optimera increases site viewability solely from a publisher’s point of view. The tech optimizes campaigns toward the most viewable placements in real time – key in an era where buyers demand highly viewable ads, but publishers lack the technology to meet these demands in a way that’s sustainable for their businesses. “The market has failed […]
Amazon Publisher Services shot up in the rankings in the 2019 Advertiser Perceptions supply-side platform (SSP) report, emerging as a challenger to Google. The survey evaluated 18 exchanges via a poll of 155 sales and ops staffers from sites with at least 3 million monthly uniques. Amazon’s sell-side ad tech business rose from eighth last […]
The TDB company that was formed when IBM sold the bulk of its Watson Marketing portfolio to private equity firm Centerbridge in April finally has a name: Acoustic. Acoustic is starting out with a large stable of clients – around 3,500 – inherited from IBM, and a headcount of 1,100. It’s also hiring, with a particular focus […]
The French ad-tech company Pubstack said Wednesday it raised $2.3 million in seed funding from two VC firms and a handful of angel investors, including Criteo co-founder Romain Niccoli. Pubstack’s tech is designed to make it easier for publishers to monitor their programmatic partners in real time, and it connects monetization data with what happened […]
This article is sponsored by Facebook. Creating a strong customer experience across all of the digital moments that matter is essential to prevent customers from dropping off. Few digital channels play a more pivotal role than Facebook and Instagram in funneling customers through this journey. According to one survey by Ipsos, nearly 75% of monthly […]
Pinterest really wants people to shop on its platform. The newly public company revamped its marketing partner program on Monday and added a new partner category for third-party tech providers that facilitate shopping experiences. But the rebrand of Pinterest’s Marketing Developer Partners program to a global Pinterest Partners program is more than a cosmetic change. […]
Instagram has a lot going for it right now: Millions of active advertisers, an opportunity to capitalize on commerce, impression growth, a love affair with DTC brands, the continued breakneck growth of Stories … and the fact that a lot of people still don’t necessarily associate it with Facebook. The Facebook connection has been both […]
The US Department of Justice is reportedly preparing an antitrust investigation into Google. But that doesn’t mean Google is headed for a breakup and, at least for now, there are way more questions than answers. Which parts of Google’s sprawling business will the DOJ look into? Will it delve beyond Google’s search practices, which have […]
When Snap first acquired Placed in 2017, it teased the prospect of proving to buyers how Snap Ads translate into store visits and real-world results. Yet over the next two years, before Snap sold Placed to Foursquare last week, Snap never highlighted the Placed technology in its pitch to media buyers; Placed was never integrated […]
The former CTO of Disney ABC Television, Michael Napodano, who also spent a decade at NBCUniversal, joined Operative on Monday in the newly created role of Chief Delivery and Information Officer. “Having been on the programming side of the house for so long, I wanted to challenge myself to be a part of a company […]
Amazon’s acquisition of Sizmek’s ad server and dynamic creative optimization (DCO) platform Friday puts it in a better position to compete with Google for advertiser budgets. Amazon will likely gain new clients from Sizmek who don’t want to deal with switching ad servers, as well as some advertisers who don’t like the idea of working […]
Mark Zuckerberg has four top priorities for Facebook in the year ahead – but stepping down as chairman of the board ain’t one of them. At Facebook’s annual stockholders meeting on Thursday, numerous resolutions to create a check on Zuckerberg’s power – he simultaneously serves as chair of the board and CEO – were vetoed, as expected. Although […]
Today in the podcast studio, Criteo COO Mollie Spilman talks about what makes companies survive and thrive in the ever-changing digital advertising business. Criteo was the emblem of the wild growth in programmatic marketing, and remains the second-largest publicly-traded ad tech companies with a valuation of $1.3B. In the five years since Spilman joined to […]
Amazon is primed to splash some color on a new product category: paint. But rather than slap on its own private label, home improvement site The Spruce lent its name and home décor expertise, selecting and naming the 32 colors of paint. Paint manufacturer KILZ produced the line. KILZ and Amazon first approached the digital […]
2018 was a pretty good year for Twitter, all things considered. Users are growing, if you don’t look at monthly active users (MAUs). Twitter is starting to get a handle on harassment, with machine learning models proactively identifying 38% of the abusive tweets taken down every week. And the platform has been profitable for four […]
Consulting firms like Deloitte and Accenture are forming mutually beneficial business partnerships with Google around selling the Google Cloud platform to enterprise customers. Deloitte and Google expanded their relationship at Google’s Next conference in April. The companies have a goal of driving billions of dollars of business to each other per year, said Tom Galizia, […]
Beyond the money they mint with their owned-and-operated inventory, Google, Facebook and Amazon are, each in their own way, bidding into nearly every programmatic auction that takes place across the open internet. Although programmatic is growing year over year, independent ad tech players are increasingly fighting over the remaining crumbs while the walled gardens cut […]
Publishers want to control their header bidding – especially in light of Google Ad Manager’s changing rules and proprietary header bidding wrappers giving preference to their own demand. To serve this need, Rubicon Project built Demand Manager, tech that sits on top of the open-source wrapper Prebid. In addition to analytics and a rich UI […]
OpenX is testing a platform called OpenAudience that lets advertisers buy using its identity graph, which includes access to unique data from its publishers. It plans to makes its identity graph-enabled buying generally available in Q3. This announcement is unusual in that exchanges like OpenX usually do not offer identity graphs that connect audience data […]
Facebook set aside $3 billion for a potential FTC fine, the company revealed Wednesday when it announced its first quarter earnings. Facebook estimates the fine, which stems from its privacy practices, could range from $3 billion to $5 billion. “We are focused on building out our privacy-focused vision for the future of social networking and […]
Snap is seeing a nice bump from performance advertisers. The platform said Tuesday that its revenues from direct-response buyers doubled over the past year, although it did not break out a figure. Total revenue grew 39% year over year to $320 million, beating analyst expectations of $307 million. Snap’s success with performance advertisers is driven […]
Twitter is angling for its sliver of the performance advertising pie dominated by Facebook and Google. A top priority for the Twitter revenue team this year is to work on enhancing its Mobile App Promotion product, the company’s answer to app install ads. The opportunity is ripe, CFO Ned Segal told investors during an earnings […]
While most DSPs let marketers increase or decrease bids based on factors like time of day, Beeswax is upgrading that idea with a product that lets buyers optimize bids based on up to 40 factors from the bid requests. Bid Models, which graduated from beta Wednesday, uses multivariate bidding algorithms to help marketers find “pockets” […]
Traditionally, a company like TIBCO, which sells integration and analytics software, thrives on events and field sales, where company reps can explain its products in person. But client buying habits have changed, even in the world of complex B2B solutions. “We heard from customers that they were spending more time online learning about products before […]
Snap teased an audience extension product called Snapchat Audience Network in early April, but the offering is still being baked and the beta likely won’t open until some point this summer. So, advertisers have to wait to find out how targeting will work outside of the Snapchat platform, what data will be available and what […]
Waze is navigating toward programmatic. The traffic and navigation app owned by Google said Wednesday it has made its Zero-speed Takeover ad unit available programmatically in Display & Video 360 (formerly known as DoubleClick Bid Manager). The unit shows up as a banner ad at the bottom of the screen when a driver stops their […]
Google is doing more to help companies connect, manage, secure and analyze ever-growing amounts of data. At its Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, the company unveiled a raft of announcements over the last two days (the event officially runs April 9-11), including new open-source integrations, more AI capabilities and product-development partnerships with large […]
Story updated to include a comment from Snap. Snapchat is on track to lose US users for the first time this year, according to eMarketer, thanks in part to continued aftershocks from its disastrous 2018 redesign. And Snap’s loss could be Instagram’s gain. Monthly users are set to decrease 2.8% year over year at Snapchat […]
