The mega-vendor wars continue. Today, Adobe Systems announced plans to acquire Parisian cross-channel marketing automation player Neolane for $600 million. The move comes weeks after cloud giant Salesforce.com said it would buy email and CRM vendor ExactTarget for $2.5 billion (AdExchanger story), part of a plan to “double down” on its Marketing Cloud strategy in the […]
Turn has snatched up Wolfgang Maasberg, the former chief executive at email and marketing automation firm Lyris, to lead its global sales operation. Prior to his job at Lyris, which he quit in March, Maasberg held North American sales leadership roles at Omniture and later Adobe. The hire speaks to two priorities at the demand-side […]
Brand Networks, a company that serves the social marketing needs of large retailers and other companies with dozens or hundreds of local outlets, has raised a whopping $68 million round from AEA Investors. As one of the remaining scaled independent platforms in social marketing, Brand Networks says it needs the capital to aggressively develop and […]
Demand-side platform Turn has hired Fernando Tassinari, former CEO of marketing agency MRM Worldwide Brazil, to lead its Sao Paolo office with the goal of expanding Turn’s presence in the country and throughout South America. “We’ve been working down there with US account managers and sales people for more than a year,” Tassinari said in an […]
A new venture from former Magnetic CEO Josh Shatkin-Margolis aims to help retailers consolidate their multi-channel interactions with consumers, using the smartphone as the hub. Called Purple Cloud, the company offers a consumer-facing app that creates incentives for users to interact and share data. The company is in beta with retailers and expects to close […]
With digital marketing budgets expected to rise this year, customer relationship management (CRM) software vendors are ramping up their pursuit of paid media budgets. “Marketing is perhaps the hottest area in the customer-facing realm right now, and it is evident the place has multiple holes to fill and many approaches to take,” observed Paul Greenberg, […]
It’s been over a year since publisher, ad server and ad exchange OpenX bought publisher ad tech services provider LiftDNA (AdExchanger story). And as often happens in these cases, the founder of the acquired company is exiting. Vadim Telyatnikov, who founded LiftDNA in 2009, told associates in an email memo obtained by AdExchanger that he is […]
Experian Marketing Services has integrated technology gained from last year’s acquisition of Conversen with its CheetahMail platform. Referred to simply as “Experian Marketing Services’ cross-channel marketing platform,” the new offering lets marketers coordinate customer interactions across email, mobile, social, web, display, and print advertising campaigns, using testing and rules-based segmentation capabilities. For instance, a customer who made a […]
Social media has made a lot of things convenient – birthday greetings, photo sharing, invitations, etc. Wrapp, a Swedish company that offers a “social gifting” app, believes the same should be done for gift cards. Founded in 2011, the company claims 1.3 million registered users and retailers like Nike, Victoria’s Secret and H&M. AdExchanger caught up with […]
For the past year, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has emphasized the company’s position as a programmatic player, discussing the importance of its “tech stack” and building up its year-old demand-side platform AdLearn. The company hopes to complete the circle around its automated ad services with the launch of its long-promised supply side platform, dubbed simply […]
Marketing technology company Syncapse learned first-hand how to work with large companies to integrate digital and social elements into their businesses, by working with RIM Blackberry as its first major client. With a team of about 70 people, the company became skilled at what would work for large enterprise companies when it comes to social […]
Last week X+1 secured a new $17 million debt facility with Ares Capital, a cash reservoir the demand-side platform plans to tap for two acquisitions this quarter (one social, one mobile). A global expansion will follow in the second half of the year, including a possible outpost in Brazil, according to CEO John Nardone. By […]
“Workflow” is not the sexiest of topics, even in the realm of digital advertising. But as the process of buying, planning and tracking digital ad buys gets more complex, both agencies and software companies are taking a more serious look at what can and should be automated. Several months ago, Mediaocean, which was the product […]
Before taking the reins at DoubleVerify six months ago, Wayne Gattinella spent ten years at the helm of WebMD. When he signed up for that job, the consumer health publisher was three years old and had collapsed to some extent, like most web content providers in that era. Since then it has largely reversed course. Revenues for […]
The number of display ad tech companies “of size” has risen sharply in recent years as mammoths like Google and Adobe are joined by hulking no-longer-startups such as BlueKai, Rocket Fuel, Collective, and AOL’s Ad.com, among others. Demand-side platform Turn should certainly be included on this list. The profitable company employs 250 and works with […]
Even though it is widely used, customers would be hard-pressed to find vendors who agree with the label “marketing automation,” according to Jon Miller, VP of marketing content and strategy at marketing automation software provider Marketo. Marketing automation is “one of those terms that nobody really seems to love but at the same time it’s […]
Digital ad management provider DG is pouring the disparate technologies and products it has bought and built over the last few years into a single receptacle called “VideoFusion.” While having a clearer marketing message is the over-arching reason for the “brand unification,” the company also wants to emphasize its proposition to be the connective tissue […]
Cox Digital Solutions, which houses the white label vertical ad network and ad serving business formerly known as Adify, will no longer offer platform services to outside media companies, the company has told clients. In a letter sent last month to customers, obtained by AdExchanger, Andy Levi director, Publisher Operations at CDS, as part of […]
Facebook has confirmed its agreement to buy Atlas from Microsoft, paving the way for a more robust demand-side offering from the company. In an interview with AdExchanger, Ads Product Director Gokul Rajaram said the primary aim is to help advertisers compare their Facebook ads with all online, and eventually offline, placements. An ad network is not […]
What do you do if you have real-time bidding software that’s non-core to your business, but could still be an asset to young ad companies faced with building their own bidders from scratch? You take it open source. That’s what Montreal-based Datacratic has done with the release of a new RTBkit framework, available at RTBkit.org. […]
Google, AppNexus, and PubMatic are all talking up the convergence of guaranteed and non-guaranteed media. The first solutions designed to address this convergence were private exchanges, embraced by many sellers but fewer on the buy side. Now the companies are moving forward on the next wave of features. Among the favored approaches is so-called “holistic […]
DataXu has raised a $27 million round, a hefty chunk though somewhat less than other recent investments in similarly mature display ad tech companies. (AppNexus secured $75 million last month, Rocket Fuel took $50 million in June). Thomvest Venture Capital led the round and gains a board seat, while current investors Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital […]
AdBrite has shut down its exchange, and says it is close to selling off its other assets: namely, its B2B Marketplace directory and the intellectual property and engineering operations that power the core exchange product. In essence, this means that adBrite as it has been known — since evolving from an ad network — will […]
No AppNexus insiders will take money off the table as the RTB pure play soaks up a new $75 million investment led by Technology Crossover Ventures. Instead, funds from the series D round will be pumped into the company in the form of new features, marketplace quality improvements, and employee development. CEO Brian O’Kelley wrote […]
The debate around multi-channel attribution is perhaps the essential marketing problem of this decade. Can you really optimize ad spend on a cross-channel basis, and at the impression level? Not yet. Will you be able to? A lot of smart money says yes, but it’s going to be a long and bumpy ride. The most […]
Less than six months since Google decided to merge its paid Product Listing Ads and its “free” shopping-related results into a single paid image-ad format, about 35% of commercial searches now show PLAs in the results, up from 29% in Oct, says Jefferies & Co.’s analyst Brian Pitz. As Google Shopping now essentially requires retailers […]
In 2013, expect to see more ad tech companies provide some automation of guaranteed sales. Among the entities working on that idea is Legolas Media, which just hired digital sell-side veteran Jonathon Shaevitz as its new CEO. Shaevitz joins Legolas from sell-side pricing and inventory manager Maxifier, where as CEO over the past two years, […]
It’s been nearly a year since ad sales workflow systems provider Mediaocean was given the regulatory green light to form the merger of Mediabank and Donovan Data Systems. While Mediaocean picked up the mantle of both entities’ attempts to bring online media buying methods to traditional TV, Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise tells AdExchanger that the […]
AppNexus is an object of some fascination in digital marketing circles, and why not? Led by former rivals from Right Media and DoubleClick Ad Exchange, the privately held company has grown up to become perhaps the only scaled “pure” technology company in the real-time bidding landscape. It provides no managed services, accepts no insertion orders, […]
Demand side platform MediaMath has scooped up Tap.Me and its roughly 11 employees for an undisclosed sum. The deal brings MediaMath a far more robust mobile and video ad serving capability than it had previously, according to CEO Joe Zawadzki. Tap.Me was previously focused on in-game ads (AdExchanger 2011 Q&A). But as sometimes happens in […]
