Oracle is buying domain services provider Dyn. While Oracle didn’t reveal the sale price in its release, former Forbes columnist Dan Primack pegged it at just north of $600 million. Dyn made waves in recent months after it was hit by a massive DDOS attack, which temporarily shut down major websites including Spotify and Twitter […]
When Atlas served ads, the industry shrugged. On Friday, Facebook made the inevitable official by retiring the ad-serving component of Atlas, thereby making it primarily a people-based measurement pixel. The ad-serving capability will be phased out over the next couple of months so as not to be disruptive to users. Facebook’s ad stack looks quite […]
Facebook admitted additional measurement errors Wednesday, along with policy and organizational changes meant to narrow the trust gap between marketers and the mobile world’s leading ad platform. The news comes less than two months after Facebook disclosed that it had been overstating video engagement results, prompting backlash from agencies and concern from other digital media […]
Adobe will acquire the video demand-side platform TubeMogul for $540 million in debt and cash, the companies said Thursday. [Here’s the deal release.] The deal gives Adobe a sophisticated DSP capability for the first time. Though Adobe had display and search-buying capabilities via the Efficient Frontier acquisition (now Media Optimizer), Adobe has never been lauded […]
Buyers can now purchase Meredith’s shopper marketing display units programmatically through a private marketplace set up through The Trade Desk. The units used to be available only through direct buy. “There is a lot of talk of the IO business migrating into programmatic, but a lot of that IO business is custom opportunities like this,” […]
As expected, Facebook enjoyed dramatic revenue growth in the third quarter on the strength of its massive mobile user base. Ad revenue grew 57% year over year to $6.8 billion. Mobile ad revenue accounted for 84% of that figure, or $5.7 billion, up from 78% one year ago. Read the earnings release. The company’s desktop […]
Rubicon will lay off 19% of its workforce, totaling 125 jobs, completing the reorganization it began in Q2. The company is also lowering its guidance for Q4. It will be the third ad tech company with an SSP to make large cuts this year. PubMatic laid off 100 last December, and AppNexus laid off 150 […]
AOL, which has signed more than 100 publishers to its header-bidding solution over the past year, is adding a wrapper so publishers can easily integrate multiple header-bidding partners. The company, which works with tens of thousands of publishers, will do the integration work for its wrapper clients. (AOL claims it won’t give an advantage to […]
With swirling acquisition rumors sidelined for the moment, Twitter announced during its Q3 earnings call Thursday that it’s cutting 9% of its workforce, ending the quarter with 3,910 employees. The restructure, which is being made with an eye on eventual profitability, will mostly affect its sales, partnerships and marketing teams. Product and development and R&D […]
The football site Scout attracts avid fans who congregate en masse during the season but spend the offseason elsewhere. That seasonality adds complexity to Scout’s advertising sales business. Scout employs a small sales force on the direct side, focusing on custom integrations and some display. Most advertisers buy direct in-season. It sells the rest of […]
When online infrastructure company Dyn got hit by three DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks Friday, it shut down major sites using Dyn, including Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify and The New York Times. The attack also disrupted the ad industry. Even if a publisher wasn’t affected, the attack impacted many of the tech partners delivering and […]
The cable model may be going online, if last week’s reports around a possible Snapchat licensing model are true. (Snapchat declined to comment.) Publishers would receive a licensing fee for their content on Snapchat Discover, instead of selling ads themselves and taking a share of revenue. By moving to this model, Snapchat would consolidate all its […]
This year, Facebook appeared to abandon its plan to develop an ad tech stack to rival Google’s DoubleClick. It shut down its SSP (LiveRail), closed the Facebook Exchange and threw away its DSP before it got off the ground. All that remains is Atlas, a former ad server repurposed as a measurement tool, and the […]
LeEco, the Chinese electronics company that shelled out $2 billion for smart TV manufacturer Vizio in July, held a splashy event Wednesday in San Francisco to mark its entry into the US, where it could one day give Apple a run for its money. Beyond making a selection of its smart devices available in the […]
Metamarkets has raised $14.25 million in growth capital from Wellington Financial and City National Bank. The company’s analytics software is designed to help clients like Twitter, Nanigans, AOL, OpenX and Drawbridge gain insight into their programmatic marketplaces. Metamarkets got the funding in part because investors are looking more favorably at ad tech, said company co-founder […]
MaxPoint helps marketers in the CPG, retail, finance, insurance and auto sectors deliver messages to customers near local stores that need a marketing boost. Now those marketers are itching to use all the first-party data they’ve collected. To activate advertisers’ CRM data, MaxPoint developed Customer Catalyst, a product that matches brands’ CRM with data showing […]
Virtual reality may have a way to go before it hits mass scale, but it’s just had a big week. Last Tuesday, Google unveiled Daydream View, its lightweight, low-cost answer to Oculus Rift, and announced its Daydream View-compatible Pixel smartphone. And on Thursday, Facebook followed with its own series of announcements at the Oculus Connect […]
On Thursday – amid strengthening rumors of an IPO – Snapchat finally released its anticipated ads API to enable better automation, targeting and measurement. It is running with nine partners. Advertisers can buy Snap Ads – full-screen, sound-on, vertical video ad units – programmatically on the platform. “Advertisers [can now] glean insights and better optimize […]
With Omar Tawakol departing as head of Oracle Data Cloud, Eric Roza, who served as the unit’s co-SVP after Oracle acquired his company Datalogix, will become GM. Roza had previously focused on Data Cloud’s go-to-market strategy and will now oversee product, engineering, operations and data science. But he’s also shepherding Data Cloud through a philosophical […]
Sourcepoint, a company founded last year to provide publishers with an antidote to ad blocking, has made its first major product release since raising a $10 million Series A round in June. The product, Dialogue, allows publishers to deliver a message to users with ad blockers installed and then test the efficacy of those messages. […]
Laura Ipsen walked into the office of Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd on a Monday this summer, and the next day she had a new job as the general manager and senior vice president of Oracle Marketing Cloud (OMC). It’s her latest role in a 25-year career spent at some of the world’s large tech titans. […]
Salesforce wants to “democratize” the development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications. That is, making AI available to as many business users as possible. Consequently, it’s baked an AI system called Einstein into the Salesforce platform – such that its capabilities are available across its various clouds, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud. “AI […]
Six weeks ago, Laura Ipsen – a former Microsoft and Cisco exec – succeeded Kevin Akeroyd as SVP and GM of Oracle Marketing Cloud (OMC). Akeroyd, one of the original architects of the OMC business, had moved on to the CEO role at Cision. Ipsen – formerly an SVP of Oracle’s global industry solutions group […]
The fast-moving space of sponsored content has already gone through three different metrics. First, brands paid a CPM to show article snippets. Now cost per view dominates. When Medium launched its sponsored content program in April, it took the currency one step further. It charges for “total time read” (TTR), a metric that bets that […]
Data management platform Krux is joining the header-bidding fray. Krux built a header bidder because it wants marketers to buy both data and media in one place. Header bidding is the best mechanism to facilitate that transaction. By rolling out the tech, Krux adds a media-buying capability to Krux Link, the data exchange bazaar it’s […]
If AppNexus Chief Economist Gabriel Weintraub could go back in time to the beginning of real-time bidding (RTB), he would have designed a different type of auction. “Because you are targeting so finely, you are creating thin markets. So the question is, how do you create rules that alleviate that issue, especially from the publisher […]
Facebook just showed up to the header bidding party. Facebook confirmed it’s “exploring header bidding with a small set of publishers.” Those partners may include USA Today and Hearst, according to The Information, which was first to report the news. For Facebook, the move could mark a significant expansion of its Audience Network platform, expanding […]
GhostBed is ready to go to the mattresses to gain share of voice in the super-competitive bed-in-a-box market. One tactic in its arsenal: cars wrapped in advertising. “It’s like a moving billboard – you’re getting an enormous number of impressions and it’s cost-effective for us,” said Marc Werner, CEO and founder of Nature’s Sleep, manufacturer of […]
Antonio Garcia Martinez led the team that built Facebook Exchange, the company’s first foray into programmatic advertising. He also had a front-row seat when Facebook killed off the initiative, a decision that effectively aborted his future with the company, as he details in his tell-all book “Chaos Monkeys.” “I had bet my entire social capital […]
As publishers embraced header bidding, many programmatic buyers observed the trend from the sidelines. Since header bidding boosts yield for publishers by increasing competition, it follows that buyers may be paying more. But buyers wouldn’t necessarily know if that’s the case, since SSPs don’t note whether the impression comes through a header or not. If […]
