Sonobi, an ad tech company serving both publishers and agencies, has raised $10.4 million in Series A funding and made a few notable hires. Among the appointments is Tony Katsur, who joins as president. A former senior exec with Rubicon Project and CEO at Maxifier, Katsur said he was drawn to the company’s audience insights, […]
Charlene Li, CEO of Altimeter Group, will appear at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference on Sept. 10, an event designed to educate marketers on advanced solutions for building seamless cross-channel brand experiences. For digital advertisers, emerging channels present new inroads to consumers, but new challenges accompany those budding opportunities. “Clients have limited time, they have limited budgets […]
Publishers seeking to create more competition and access for programmatic buyers have embraced header bidding over the past year. AppNexus first brought header bidding technology to market in 2009, back when RTB first started, but not many of its customers used it. Now it’s seeing increased demand from publishers adding its header bidding (or pre-bid) […]
Ad tech partnerships are fast and frequent, as vendors move to establish a presence in disciplines where they were formerly lacking, or to bolster their inventory pool. Certainly, these integrations are easier with the emergence of standards like openRTB, but there’s still more to it. “Now that everyone can support openRTB, you have to do […]
Neustar is banking on growth in its marketing services division, the primary point of conversation during its Q2 2015 earnings call. That the company will likely lose a major contract that supplies number portability services to the United States might be a financial hit, though CEO Lisa Hook was adamant that it won’t affect Neustar’s growing marketing […]
Facebook is mostly an app company now. Desktop monetization of Facebook’s owned and operated properties keeps shrinking both in actual numbers and as a percentage of the overall business. In the second quarter of 2015, desktop revenue shrank 8% and contributed less than one-fourth of Facebook’s total ad revenue, the company said in its earnings disclosure […]
Twitter finally appears to be catching the worm. Or at least its Q2 isn’t a can of worms à la last quarter’s earnings leak. The company reported a solid Q2, beating Wall Street’s expectations with a 61% year-over-year increase in revenue to $502 million for the quarter, 25% of which came from direct-response – the “fastest-growing […]
Rubicon Project branched out into new areas in a strong Q2 that saw revenue grow 88% to $53 million. Managed revenue grew 48% to $227.2 million. Rubicon increased its cut of managed revenue, with take rate going up from 18.4% from last year to 21.4% this year. (Read the full earnings release here.) The company closed […]
Sometimes it takes a few bad dates before you find the one. So it would seem to be with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who after some less than ideal pairings with sales execs may have found her perfect match in Lisa Utzschneider. Just nine months after her initial hire as head of sales for Yahoo […]
The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), which is uniting industry players to root out criminal activity in digital advertising, has unveiled a pilot program to block fraudulent traffic coming from data centers. Google proposed the data center project and is leading the pilot program, which will see member companies sharing intelligence about fraudulent data centers. The companies […]
John Nardone, the newly minted CEO of UK-based ad serving platform Flashtalking, feels like he’s come full circle. After spending more than 10 years deep in the ad tech weeds, Nardone, whose resumé includes the chief exec role at [x+1] – which sold to Rocket Fuel in August 2014 for around $230 million – and the co-presidency at […]
Technorati on Monday released SmartWrapper, a SaaS-based product that helps publishers run multiple header bidding partners by bringing all demand partners into one place. For publishers juggling multiple partners, SmartWrapper helps manage implementation page latency and gives publishers more unified analytics. With the product release, Technorati enters a different market. “We see this continuing down […]
PowerInbox is bringing content recommendation engines to email via its RevenueStripe product. Think Outbrain meets LiveIntent. Beta-launched last summer and brought to the general market in January, RevenueStripe is gaining traction. It now appears in 1.5 billion emails a month. It’s attracted 60 publishers, like Ziff Davis, Prime Publishing and Hearst, which inserts RevenueStripe into […]
Beyond the morass of fraud and viewability hides another tripwire for advertisers: government regulation. That’s why UK-based credit card issuer Barclaycard is getting proactive about compliance. As a company that’s smaller than the competition and still making inroads in the US market, Barclaycard is particularly risk averse when it comes to regulatory issues. To that […]
Some bots are good, but most bots are not – and Distil Networks, which announced $21 million in Series B on Tuesday, has its eye on the latter. The round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with pinch hitting from Foundry, TechStars, ff Venture Capital, Idea Fund and Correlation Ventures, brings Distil’s total funding to $38 million. […]
B2B vendors have a wealth of white papers and other content marketing materials, but often struggle to find the right readers. Distributing B2B content usually requires direct deals with individual publishers, which can limit scale for advertisers when those publishers have small footprints. To address this issue, B2B content marketing company NetLine created a marketplace […]
Ben Barokas – whose company AdMeld was purchased by Google in 2011 – unveiled his latest venture Thursday: Sourcepoint. The company, through which publishers can ask their audience to support the content either through general advertising, interest-based advertising or subscription, also raised a $10 Million Series A round Thursday, led by Spark Capital and Foundry […]
Email advertising and marketing platform LiveIntent unveiled a $32.5 million growth equity investment on Wednesday, led by FTV Capital. Other investors include Battery Ventures, First Round Capital and Shasta Ventures. It will use the funds primarily to build out its platform and APIs for wider integration with other marketing tech companies like Salesforce, an effort […]
By Allison Schiff and Zach Rodgers. Wall Street never really seemed to get soon-to-be-former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. Costolo will step down as chief exec of Twitter on July 1, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. [Read the SEC filing.] Founder and board chairman Jack Dorsey will take the […]
Agencies and publishers alike have jumped into private marketplaces. Rocket Fuel, known for its performance-driven campaigns in open marketplaces, has lately begun pitching an offering of its own. For the past six months, it’s partnered with agencies and publishers to enable performance-driven campaigns in premium environments, building on technology put in place by [x+1], which […]
Datasift’s hookup with Facebook is gaining steam. It’s a good thing for the social media data provider, which got cut off from Twitter’s firehose in April, one month after announcing its non-exclusive Facebook partnership. On Wednesday, social analytics platform Pulsar became one of the first Datasift clients to benefit from this connection – it will […]
Cxense, a Norwegian provider of publisher-focused ad tech, on Monday acquired Maxifier, whose technology optimizes direct sold campaigns, for $3.56 million in stock. “Our ability to understand customer behavior and data will be injected into Maxifier’s extremely rich ability to forecast and optimize advertising campaigns, and vice versa,” said Geraldo Maroniene, Cxense’s EVP of corporate […]
When Canadian messaging platform Kik, which aims to become the “WeChat of the West,” hired former Accuen CEO Josh Jacobs as its president of Kik Services, many wondered why someone who had been so ingrained in advertising would pivot to messaging. Or maybe it’s not such a pivot: After all, Jacobs will supervise the new […]
Magnetic and MyBuys announced Wednesday they will merge, creating a company with a combined gross revenue of $100 million spanning ad tech and marketing tech. With their dual capabilities, they will be able to leverage first-party and third-party data to inform their 700 clients’ advertising spend and marketing efforts throughout the customer life cycle. At the same […]
Collective CEO Joe Apprendi would rather not describe his company’s shift toward self-service as a “pivot.” “We use the word ‘diversification,’” Apprendi told AdExchanger. “We realize that there are clients out there who want to engage with our capabilities in a variety of different ways.” Historically, Collective didn’t offer that variety. Like a lot of […]
Female-oriented publisher SheKnows hired as its first CTO Carl Hixson, who’s built digital platforms for Getty Images, HBO, Pearson and McGraw-Hill. He’ll turn his experience toward Momentum, SheKnows’ data-driven content management system designed to help advertisers “create content [and] manage ad units around content in a single, seamless ecosystem,” Hixson said. Momentum is expected to […]
Pinterest revealed Tuesday that marketers this summer will be able to target audiences, buy inventory on a cost-per-engagement (CPE) or cost-per-action (CPA) basis and run video units called Cinematic Pins. “These solutions map to any marketing objective,” said Tim Kendall, Pinterest’s GM of monetization. He described Pinterest’s ad solution set as “comprehensive” – a trait […]
Taboola is paving the way to enter the Chinese market. On Monday, it revealed it had received a multimillion-dollar investment from Chinese search provider Baidu. Baidu does not name the level of investment unless SEC rules require it. “The goal behind the investment is to work together on launching native advertising in China,” Taboola CEO […]
In its first earnings call since going public in March, MaxPoint reported revenue growth of 87% to $28.7 million. Its revenue ex-TAC, which excludes the cost of programmatically buying impressions through real-time bidding, rose 90% to $16.8 million. [Read the earnings release.] The total number of enterprise customers rose 62% to 529. In the first quarter of […]
AOL reported revenue growth of 7% YoY in the first quarter, for a total of $625 million. Global advertising revenue, which includes AOL’s own properties, search and third-party platforms, climbed 12% YoY to $483 million. Read the earnings release. CEO Tim Armstrong said the company continues to make updates “placing AOL at the center of […]
