Twitter will pay $532.6 million – all in stock– to acquire digital ad platform TellApart, the company disclosed in an 8K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It’s a large figure for an ad tech purchase, placing TellApart’s market cap above most public companies in the space and making it the spendiest merger deal Twitter has done yet. In […]
Turn is making some changes at the top. Bill Demas, CEO of the scaled demand-side platform, will exit the company in what is being characterized as a mutual decision between him and the board. Demas told employees on Wednesday that he will stay on long enough for the company to identify a successor and that he will remain […]
Rubicon Project acquired search and website retargeting firm Chango in a $122 million cash and stock (but mostly stock) transaction, the companies said Thursday. (Read the investor release.) “There’s one area of the market we haven’t addressed in the past, and that’s intent marketing,” Rubicon CEO Frank Addante told AdExchanger. “If Google has the platform for search, […]
Boston-based DataXu is getting into the cross-device game with a management, targeting and measurement capability of its own. The demand-side platform’s cross-device tool, dubbed OneView, exits beta next month. DataXu’s take on cross-device simplification hinges on compliance management. The tool offers check-box controls for marketers to tailor which data sources are used for targeting and […]
So-called marketing clouds have commonly focused on enabling outreach to known customers, which is why they lean heavily on email marketing, CRM and campaign management – while paid media remains an afterthought. But Adobe, whose annual summit began Monday in Salt Lake City, is diving into ad tech with an upgrade to its Media Optimizer […]
More automation is in the cards for Rubicon Project, which revealed its short-term goals around guaranteed orders at its Automation Summit in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., on Thursday. The company launched an updated product that powers direct, guaranteed orders. “Digital advertising is a $62 billion opportunity,” CEO Frank Addante told attendees. “The largest part, premium, […]
Sharing financial performance figures for the first time Thursday, PubMatic said its annualized net revenue run rate is now above $130 million, based on year-end figures. From 2013 to 2014, the publisher platform company said GAAP net revenue grew 90%. PubMatic did not disclose net income, but revealed it had turned a small profit for the past […]
Rubicon Project’s focus on premium inventory, international expansion and new products looks to be paying off. CEO Frank Addante said during the company’s Q4 earnings call – in which it posted quarterly revenue of $41.8 million, up 49% YoY – that Rubicon had avoided low-quality sellers that would have boosted short-term revenue while hurting its […]
Paris-based direct and programmatic ad platform Smart AdServer will break away from its parent company, the Internet portal AuFeminin, through a buyout by private equity firm Cathay Capital for $42.1 million, the companies said Thursday. “Smart AdServer is entering a new phase and the market is evolving very fast,” said Smart AdServer US General Manager […]
Rocket Fuel appears to be bracing for a chilly wind, at least when it comes to the insertion order-based media sales business that has been the core of its revenue engine for the past several years. The programmatic platform company reported Q4 revenues of $139.5 million, a 63% lift compared to Q4 2013. That’s a […]
Criteo, which began as a retargeter of online display, expanded on its product roadmap during the company’s Q4 and FY 2014 earnings call Wednesday. Criteo’s focus is “leveraging the huge momentum in mobile commerce,” said CEO Jean-Baptiste Rudelle by emphasizing its multi-screen solution and cross-device ID. “Converting customers across multiple marketing channels is critical for CMOs. […]
Now that Right Media Exchange (RMX) has been officially sunsetted by the powers that be, the Yahoo Ad Exchange has become a private marketplace of sorts, where demand can plug into Yahoo-owned and -operated supply. Yahoo has made a concentrated effort to streamline its ad business in the past year. The company used CES 2014 as […]
The recent history of digital advertising is full of ad networks that have pivoted, or are trying to pivot, away from the withering RFP trade. Some have become demand-side platforms or analytics tools geared to advertisers and agencies. Fewer have positioned around the publisher. Family run Casale Media is in that smaller group. Founded in […]
Facebook reported ad revenue growth of 53% in the fourth quarter as it put the pedal down on video ads and its mobile ad network. Speaking on the quarterly earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts that Facebook users now watch 3 billion videos per day on average, a figure that only includes videos directly uploaded […]
Facebook’s Atlas is mapping a course for cross-device world domination – one agency holding company relationship at a time. In a move reminiscent of its partnership with Omnicom, Atlas unveiled Wednesday a three-year global hook-up with Havas Media Group. Omnicom was an Atlas launch partner back in September when the rebooted ad server rose from Microsoft’s ashes […]
Justin Bieber’s bulge. Those are three words you probably didn’t expect to see – but that’s exactly what was trending the most among college-age girls after images were released from the Bieb’s photoshoot for Calvin Klein underwear last week. For brands targeting girls 18-24, the question is at what point they should be all over that bulge, […]
Yahoo has promoted Flurry executive Prashant Fuloria to head up all advertising products, the company confirmed on Friday. Fuloria’s title is SVP of Advertising Products, a job with oversight of Yahoo’s display, native, video and mobile ad products. He will report directly to Marissa Mayer and will oversee Scott Burke (who runs Yahoo Ad Manager Plus and Yahoo Gemini, and who moves […]
Most would argue that Yahoo’s de facto policy on the Right Media Exchange had been “do not resuscitate” for quite some time – but now RMX is officially off life support. Several sources tell AdExchanger that Yahoo is finally shutting down the exchange for all non-Yahoo owned and operated networks and publishers. Depending on your […]
Last year at CES, Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer presented on stage and revealed Yahoo Advertising as the umbrella housing the company’s ad products. At CES 2015, the company was less central. Simon Khalaf, CEO of Yahoo’s July acquisition of Flurry, gave a “state of mobile” keynote at the APPNATION conference, held at the same time […]
Just a few months after it hired Digilant COO Nathan Woodman to take charge of its demand-side business, IPONWEB has nabbed another well-known ad tech guy. The 13-year-old ad platform company has hired Bob Walczak, VP product at PubMatic, to oversee BidSwitch, its ad exchange-like product. At IPONWEB, Walczak will run sales and business operations for BidSwitch, a […]
Oracle has agreed to acquire Datalogix, a data solutions company that shopped itself around in recent weeks, as AdExchanger has reported. As we previously reported, Facebook, Nielsen and Adobe have also shown interest in the business. Although the deal price was undisclosed, Oracle paid about 6.25x for BlueKai. If Datalogix had revenue of $125 million, that means […]
If data is currency, then it’s no wonder most companies lock it in a safe (unless you’re Sony Pictures Entertainment, in which case you just put it on a Word document somewhere). But this can be a tremendous point of frustration for brands that want to use the data housed by the big dogs of […]
Spotify is getting into the local ad game, courting brands with a platform that helps advertisers geotarget audiences in the US. The music streaming service will debut its Spot Radio Platform for brands on Jan. 1. The tool is backboned by Triton Digital, a marketing service to the media industry and a tech provider whose […]
Advertisers need to be inventive to adhere to health marketing regulations, particularly since 2011, when the IAB banned health marketers from using cookies to target patients. PageScience’s approach is to bring contextual, cookie-less targeting to its clients through page scoring. On Wednesday, the company made public its Health Insights dashboard, which lets brands and agencies […]
When it comes to performance metrics, AIG’s online marketing chief Daniel Loebl isn’t joking around. “In my work, we don’t have soft metrics,” said Loebl, whose official title is assistant VP of the digital center of excellence at AIG in the US. “I don’t allow them in my spend. Something either gets conversions or not.” […]
When Undertone released its programmatic platform Virtuoso in September, the goal, according to co-founder Eric Franchi, was for it to eventually become the primary console of brands and agencies that want to purchase high-impact ad units, or ads that use unique formats designed to snag the audience’s attention. The onetime ad network has hired George […]
Rubicon Project has snapped up iSocket and Shiny Ads, two companies in the rapidly emerging category of automating direct, negotiated deals between ad buyer and publisher. The total cost of both deals is less than $30 million, mostly paid in stock, according to a press release. The bulk of that $30 million likely went to iSocket, […]
Sizmek had another disappointing quarter, with Q3 revenues increasing only 3% YoY to $39.5 million – results that “were lower than we had expected,” according to company CEO Neil Nguyen. The decline was driven by the company’s faltering rich media business, which decreased 35% YoY. The ad management company found a silver lining in its […]
Rocket Fuel is adding SaaS to its revenue mix, but slowly. During the company’s Q3 earnings call with investors on Wednesday, CEO George John said Rocket Fuel now has 137 “licensee customers” buying through one of its three software-as-a-service channels. Those channels are: Rocket Fuel’s self-serve offering, called Mission Control; the company’s partnership with Dentsu subsidiary CCI in Japan; and [x+1], the […]
SHIFT is among the first Facebook marketing partners to integrate with the newly rebuilt Atlas ad platform. CEO James Borow said the company’s customers will soon be able to leverage Facebook’s data within SHIFT’s new platform to reach people in mobile apps outside of Facebook-owned mobile apps. “The inventory is not just locked within the […]
