Twitter’s stock took a tumble after trading closed on Tuesday. The reason, as ever? Stalled monthly active users (MAUs). Total MAU growth in Q3 grew a scant 11% year over year to 320 million, an increase of just 4 million users over last quarter. Wall Street was not impressed. Analysts had been expecting at least […]
AppNexus has long been the grand poobah of indie programmatic media platforms. But lately it has begun to look like a company under siege. There’s the fraud issue, which became an albatross after competitors Rubicon Project and OpenX cleaned up two years ago while AppNexus continued to allow blind impression resale. It has since fixed […]
If ad tech is a dinner party, someone forgot to invite the creative – or, at least, that’s what it can often feels like to the marketers and agencies tasked with creative production and testing. “I’ve been on the agency side and now I’m on the marketing side, and through both of those lenses I’ve […]
GameSpot readers know what they like – and they know what they don’t like. Owned and operated by CBS Interactive, the video game news and reviews site caters to the mainstream console gamer aged 18 to 40. And they’re an opinionated, assorted bunch. “On the surface level, that might seem like a homogenous audience – simply […]
Twitter and Square have more in common than Jack Dorsey as CEO – both platforms have a marked interest in small and medium-sized businesses. While Twitter maintains a suite of Promoted Products aimed at small business owners, including Quick Promote, a tool that allows brands to amplify tweets directly from the Twitter analytics dashboard, Square’s entire […]
Facebook is taking the next logical step in its evolution toward a full-stack ad tech offering, rolling out a demand-side platform (DSP) capable of executing programmatic buys using the company’s “people-based” advertising methodology. In recent weeks Facebook’s Atlas team has pitched the DSP product to agency partners, including Omnicom Group, Havas, Merkle and others, according […]
Publisher-facing ad platform PubMatic has let go about 50 employees, or 8% of its global headcount of 600. Many of the cuts were in India, where the company has significant development and support operations. The changes were motivated by a desire to improve the overall level of service, including by bringing service teams in-market to […]
If Facebook wants to grab budgets from TV media planners, it has to speak their language. To make buying and measuring digital video ads easier for TV buyers, Facebook has unveiled support for TRP [target rating point] buying this week. TRP buying enables advertisers to plan, buy and measure online video and TV campaigns holistically. Media […]
First there was Right Media. Then there was the Yahoo Ad Exchange. Now there’s BrightRoll. Yahoo started off Advertising Week on Monday with the announcement that it had consolidated all of its programmatic ad tech under a single umbrella – the BrightRoll brand. The purple platform has been on a bit of an ad tech spree […]
PulsePoint is planning to get acquisitive. On Monday, the programmatic platform announced $30 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank, the majority of which will be used to buy companies to complement PulsePoint’s existing tech stack. PulsePoint – which was formed through the merger of Datran Media and ContextWeb in 2011 – had previously raised a […]
AdsNative added $8.5 million in Series A funding to its war chest on Thursday as it moves to offer an alternative to the market’s dominant ad server. AdsNative’s solution combines a native, mobile-optimized ad server with the option to add on a yield optimizer and exchange. By solving for publisher problems capturing mobile and native […]
Rubicon Project-owned Chango recently poached customers from eBay Enterprise who were using a white-labeled version of Chango’s product, AdExchanger has learned. In what could be construed as a cautionary tale to any company bundling and reselling a partner’s technology, Chango sales reps approached the dozen or so retailers, some of them with significant media budgets, […]
Former Google and BrightRoll exec Bruce Falck has joined Turn as CEO, the company revealed Tuesday. Most recently, Falck was COO of video marketplace BrightRoll, which Yahoo acquired last fall. Prior to that, he spent eight years at Google, where he was instrumental in expanding the Google Display Network and DoubleClick businesses. His transition to […]
Rubicon Project CEO Frank Addante has long expressed a vision to automate the buying and selling of all advertising. On Thursday, the company took the first step in expanding beyond digital by partnering with out-of-home trading platform BitPoster to bring inventory into Rubicon’s orders platform. “It’s the first foray into media outside of digital,” said Jay […]
On any given day or month, the programmatic marketplace is filled with spiky peaks and valleys as CPMs rise and fall and as audiences ebb and flow. The best trading desks, advertisers, publishers, DSPs and exchanges don’t just understand these variations in price, volume and user behavior. They act on them. That action might mean […]
“10 Reasons Why You Should…”-type content is usually 10 reasons why you shouldn’t – and don’t. “Content that works is content that enraptures an audience and that means being story-driven,” said Alex Gold, co-founder of Buzzstarter, a programmatic content distribution platform based out of Silicon Valley whose clients include Dove, Yahoo, Axe, Degree, Campbell’s, Absolut Vodka […]
Facebook on Tuesday expanded the ad formats publishers can add to their mobile apps via the Facebook Audience Network (FAN). These formats include a native video unit that shows in-feed as well as three interstitial formats: carousel ads, which show up to five ads in a single unit; dynamic product ads, often used by retailers […]
Accuen has a new chief exec in the form of Megan Pagliuca, who comes to Omnicom Group’s trading desk after five years as general manager of digital media at Merkle. Pagliuca replaces Josh Jacobs, who helmed Accuen for nearly four years before leaving in March. Jacobs later turned up as president of Kik Services, where […]
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 […]
