Facebook reported second-quarter earnings on Thursday amid generally high expectations for the company’s advertising business, especially as it pertains to mobile and video. Investors were not disappointed. Facebook posted Q2 advertising revenue of $2.68 billion, a 67% increase from Q2 2013. Of that, mobile advertising is becoming increasingly important – it constituted 62% of Facebook’s total advertising […]
LinkedIn will buy Bizo, a B2B display ad platform, for $175 million in cash and stock, the companies said Tuesday. “It’s exciting for us to bring Bizo’s expertise and technology into our ecosystem,” said Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s SVP of product and user experience, in a statement. “Our ability to integrate their B2B solutions with our content marketing […]
It’s hard times for late stage advertising technology companies. Many public and private investors are gloomy on ad tech, and older startups needing new funds lately find themselves forced to choose between unattractive options, such as going public or raising money at a lower valuation, a painful event sometimes referred to as a “down round.” […]
Video demand-side platform TubeMogul priced the shares for its public offering Thursday, and the target price is significantly lower than the $11 to $13 per share the company previously specified. The company now expects to debut shares at a rock-bottom $7.00 to $8.00, according to an updated S-1. The company had previously hoped to raise $93 million, […]
When B. Bonin Bough, the VP of global media and consumer engagement at Mondelēz International, took the stage Tuesday at the Cannes Lions festival, he proclaimed that he couldn’t see a reason why brands wouldn’t go completely programmatic – a sentiment he held even back in 2013. In 2014, Mondelēz set the first stages of […]
In a wide-ranging panel at Cannes, CEOs Dick Costolo (Twitter), Philippe Dauman (Viacom) and Martin Sorrell (WPP) discussed the evolution of rich media consumption on mobile devices and why marketer investment in mobile video does not yet match consumer demand. Sorrell, who opened the panel by stating WPP spends $750 million with Viacom (said Dauman: […]
The world’s largest independent ad tech company broke character this week. Before snatching up Paris-based ad viewability firm Alenty, as AdExchanger was first to report, AppNexus had been historically inclined to build rather than buy owing to its strong engineering culture. But that may be changing as bargains present themselves in the form of mature […]
User-generated photos and videos are a largely untapped resource for advertisers. The challenge is leveraging the inventory. A few startups have offered up solutions: GumGum helped L’Oréal place ads on publisher sites based on the hair color of women in photos and Stipple lets consumers make purchases directly from an image. British ad tech firm WeSEE is […]
The underlying theme of SAP’s massive annual show SapphireNow in Orlando, Fla. this week was simplicity, or SAP’s lack thereof. CEO Bill McDermott heralded the dream of enabling the enterprise software company to “Run Simple,” while acknowledging the company’s skeptics. “Yes, I do realize there will be some of you, especially the pundits, who say we can’t,” […]
Two months after the Media Ratings Council (MRC) green-lighted viewable impressions as a viable metric for transacting display ads, real-time bidding platform AppNexus has acquired French viewability vendor Alenty for an undisclosed sum. The deal closed Monday, AppNexus confirmed to AdExchanger. Paris-based Alenty was founded in 2007 by CEO Laurent Nicolas and CTO Nicolas Thomas. It claims to […]
Online advertising-management provider Marin Software has acquired retargeting platform Perfect Audience for $22.8 million. The deal adds to Marin’s social media and display advertising retargeting arsenal and to the flurry of funding rounds, IPOs and acquisitions in the retargeting space over the past year. San Francisco-based Perfect Audience was founded under the Y Combinator seed accelerator program […]
Need more proof Pinterest is preparing for a big monetization push? The social platform has hired Jonathan Shottan, a former Facebook ad product exec who led Facebook Exchange and due diligence on ad tech M&A. Shottan, who has also signed on as an adviser to TellApart, joins Pinterest as product manager for advertising. His first […]
Salesforce.com reported fiscal first-quarter 2015 revenue of $1.23 billion, up 37% year over year at 11 cents per share. This beat analyst estimates of $1.21 billion at 10 cents per share. (Earnings release) Salesforce.com added significant head count – more than 900 – to its employee base this quarter. This was up 38% year over […]
Standalone marketing technology platform Captora has raised $22 million in Series B financing. The company, co-founded by the former chief revenue officer of independent marketing automation platform Marketo, claims to siphon in-site demand data to flag the highest potentially performing areas for a marketer to put their dollars. The latest round of funding will go […]
Rubicon Project is the latest ad tech company to support automation of direct deals. Its first product in this area, called 49bc, will focus on mobile inventory only. Later this year it expects to add support for desktop and video to the toolset, which is still in private beta. Rubicon is one of about 10 […]
Research from Altimeter Group released Tuesday predicted that content marketing tools will begin to consolidate and eventually merge with marketing tech solutions. “The major vendors—Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle—they’re all talking about their marketing clouds. What is that? It is an amalgam of the tools they’re compiling that cover everything involved with ads, creative, targeting, serving and […]
If Oracle will flaunt the tight integration of its Marketing Cloud, so too will Adobe. The company, at its Digital Marketing Summit EMEA in London Wednesday, revealed (among other Marketing Cloud enhancements) tighter integration between its Media Optimizer and Analytics applications. In so doing, Adobe seems to be in the early stages of positioning itself as a […]
Changes are afoot at Nanigans, as the Facebook ad partner repositions to serve in-house marketers strictly on a software subscription basis. The company has stopped signing new managed services business and will focus on getting its self-serve platform into the hands of marketers in the ecommerce and app verticals. As part of this singular focus […]
When ad tech company IgnitionOne acquired data-management platform (DMP) Knotice, did it become a marketing cloud? CEO Will Margiloff would say the company was one even before. In the most literal sense, he’s right: “We decided back in 2011, well before anyone talked about marketing clouds, that you need to integrate the disparate pieces of […]
Performance Horizon Group (PHG) is an affiliate marketing campaign management provider whose clients have included Sony and T-Mobile. Started in 2010 with seven employees, the company now has nearly 60 on staff in offices in London and Newcastle, England, New York and Sydney. The company is led by some of the founding members of Buy.at, […]
Still thinking of AOL as a media company? Tim Armstrong wants to change your mind. On the company’s Q1 earnings call Wednesday, its CEO repeatedly invoked “platforms,” “mechanization” and, of course, “programmatic” as the underpinnings of the business. AOL’s Tuesday acquisition of multitouch attribution vendor Convertro also hammered this message home. Armstrong’s platform ardor almost […]
Following Google and AOL’s acquisitions of multitouch attribution vendors Adometry and Convertro Tuesday, several questions arose. The first, and perhaps easiest to answer: What was the driving force for the purchasers and how will the technologies plug into their existing platforms? “The macro rationale for both of the acquisitions seems to be the growing need […]
Google will scoop up Adometry, a marketing attribution firm whose product is designed to assign value to incremental media impressions. Some industry watchers, like research firm Forrester, consider Adometry’s solution superior to Google’s home-grown technology. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Austin, Texas-based Adometry and its approximately 130 employees will eventually be incorporated into the Google Analytics […]
Rubicon Project went public earlier this month, becoming the fifth ad tech company – give or take – to do so since the IPO door was flung open around this time last year. Since then its stock has had a bumpy ride, but no more so than some others in its class. CEO Frank Addante […]
Premium publishers have needed some convincing to open up their more valuable inventory to programmatic buying technologies. But interest in tools that streamline the often unwieldy direct sales process has heated up. It’s one of the reasons Yieldex, a company best known for producing forecasting and analytics tools for premium inventory, introduced a new line […]
Correction 4/17: The product name is Harvest RTG, not Heritage RTG as originally stated. Public service advertising (PSA) agency PlowShare is introducing a programmatic trading desk, Harvest RTG, built by advertising technology provider RUN. The platform is designed to enable non-profits to run PSA’s programmatically, targeting diverse audiences across different screens. Josh Millman, director of digital […]
IBM will acquire email and marketing automation vendor Silverpop, the companies said Thursday. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but a story last month in the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported the value of a rumored acquisition at $270 million. IBM, like Adobe and Oracle, has remained steady on the acquisitions front. “They got massive marketing […]
Rubicon Project began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday at $15, the low end of its previously stated $15 to $17 range range. Updated: As of 10:45 a.m. EDT, the stock was trading up 34% at $2o.10 per share. CEO Frank Addante and fellow C-Suite founders Greg Raifman (president) and Todd Tappin (COO/CFO) were […]
Rob Leathern, the CEO of Optimal Inc. who sold his company to Brand Networks last year for $35 million, is sailing for new shores. The serial entrepreneur and one-time research analyst told AdExchanger he has started work on a new venture that is aimed at consumers and is not ad-related. Leathern, whose title was chief […]
AOL Networks on Wednesday rebranded as AOL Platforms. As part of the rebrand, the company has rolled programmatic capabilities for video with Adap.tv, mobile and display with the AdLearn Open Platform (AOP) and its supply-side Marketplace product, into the development of platform “ONE by AOL.” IPG Mediabrands is the charter agency partner for ONE, which […]
