For Mike Baker, trekking to the top of a snowy mountain in Colorado and then snowboarding down isn’t all that different from the gumption it takes to found and nurture a startup. “It’s not for everybody, but for people who are crazy enough to enjoy sacrifice and grit, it’s great – the journey is also the […]
Might the TV buyer’s dream of purchasing inventory across networks using the same audience definition finally be coming true? AMC Networks, Disney and WarnerMedia said Wednesday their linear TV inventory will be available through Xandr Invest. Starting mid-April, buyers will be able to log into Xandr Invest, Xandr’s programmatic buying platform, to access linear TV […]
As the local TV market grapples with falling ratings and viewership, it’s getting harder to meet the reach demands of advertisers. “We still hold our stations accountable to their guaranteed ratings,” said Joe Cerone, EVP of local investment at Zenith. “It may take extra spots to make it happen.” Local media sellers are trying to […]
Roku’s platform business is growing like a weed. Platform revenues, which include ad sales, increased 78% year over year in 2019 to $740 million, the company said Thursday in its Q4 2019 earnings report. Platform revenue accounted for 63% of Roku’s total annual revenue, which grew 52% year over year to $1.1 billion. In Q4, […]
You’ve heard of dynamic product placement. So, why not dynamic audio? Spanish-language broadcaster Univision is experimenting with a new advanced TV product that dynamically swaps out the generic sounds in an episode and replaces them with a bit of branded audio. T-Mobile is Univision’s first partner for the initiative, which debuted during the Monday night […]
Corporate siblings WarnerMedia and Xandr are full steam ahead on data-driven TV sales. Just look at this year’s upfront, where the AT&T subsidiaries will go to market together for the first time. The companies have been inching their way toward a joint offering over the past year and a half in an effort to sell […]
Ampersand, the sales consortium owned by Comcast, Cox and Charter, wants to simplify advanced TV ad buying by pooling the fragmented inventory across networks and cable operators across the United States. So it launched the AND platform Thursday, an interface where ad buyers can buy, plan and measure advanced TV inventory across Ampersand’s 85 million […]
Taking in the sprawl of CES in Las Vegas, one thing is clear: “There’s a ton of focus on streaming – it’s front and center,” according to Jay Prasad. The same can be said of Prasad’s new employer. Prasad joined LiveRamp in January after five years as chief strategy and business officer at video tech startup […]
Swapping out ads on linear TV to target audiences just got a bit more real. Project OAR (“Open, Addressable, Ready”), a consortium backed by smart TV maker Vizio, said Monday at CES it has finalized open specifications for dynamic ad insertion on linear TV and integrated with major ad decisioning engines including FreeWheel, Google Ad […]
AMC Networks – like the TV industry as a whole – is stepping up its efforts to make TV more data-driven. And a large part of that initiative means making its data across all AMC brands – including IFC, BBC America, SundanceTV and We TV – available to advertisers. In late December, it brought on […]
Cadent said it acquired ad tech company 4INFO on Thursday to help buyers to better allocate spend across channels and platforms as TV viewing fragments. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Cadent works with buyers and sellers to execute addressable and data-driven linear TV buys. It will gain access to OTT and CTV inventory […]
The 2010s was a decade of tectonic shifts for the TV industry. Linear TV networks can no longer avoid the digital revolution. As eyeballs shift to streaming platforms and buyers demand more automation and better measurement, new players, like Hulu and Roku, have risen as prime media sellers, while broadcasters evolve their businesses to capture […]
Using advanced TV to get incremental reach is all the rage among advertisers. Dish Media is launching Reach Booster in January of next year. The product uses its addressable TV tech and data so linear TV buyers can drive incremental reach across the Dish and Sling TV footprint. Advertisers can also show additional ads to […]
The advertising industry has a problem: People don’t want to be interrupted by commercials anymore. Hulu is trying to fix that by offering new ad units that are less disruptive. On Thursday, the streaming service released an advertising experience designed to lighten ad loads for people watching multiple episodes of a show in a row. […]
When a Toyota commercial airs, Vinay Shahani, the company’s North America VP of integrated marketing operations, knows that most people who see it aren’t in market for a car. So the company looks at search activity to assess the value of its TV ad spend. Using data and analytics company EDO, Toyota can measure web […]
CBS joined OpenAP, the companies said Monday. The move comes less than a week after CBS’ merger with OpenAP founding member Viacom closed. With CBS joining, OpenAP’s members together represent the majority of national TV ad spend, as well as 92% of all US audiences watching TV. “We heard from buyers that they wanted to […]
Coke, Chevrolet, Casio, Burger King, Reebok, Adidas, Old Navy. Netflix content including “Stranger Things,” “GLOW,” “El Camino” and the animated Christmas film “Klaus” are increasingly fertile ground for in-show product placements and brand tie-ins. Originals serve as the inspiration for new consumer products. But most of those deals are struck directly between Netflix and the […]
It’s been a year of breakneck user growth for Pluto TV. Monthly active users hit 20 million in November, a 70% increase since January, when Viacom acquired the free ad-supported streaming service for $340 million. That’s nearly 8 million new users in less than a year. So, how did Pluto do it? Its growth is […]
Newly-minted Comscore CEO Bill Livek’s top challenge is also his first order of business. “It’s not easy communicating that all of the bad stuff that happened in the past is, well, in the past,” said Livek, who took over as chief exec in early November from interim CEO Dale Fuller. Livek helmed Rentrak for nearly […]
Snip, snip, whoosh. Hear that? It’s the sound of cords being cut followed by an inexorable decline in TV ad spending. The share of TV ad spend in the United States is set to drop below 30% of total ad spending for the first time this year, according to eMarketer research released on Wednesday. By […]
Disney posted solid results Thursday for its fiscal fourth quarter with $19.04 billion in quarterly revenue, beating expectations of $19.1 billion. The company also announced that Hulu is now the official streaming home for FX Network content. But the company’s earnings call would have been a lot more interesting if it took place five days […]
San Francisco-based TV and video analytics company Samba TV cut a large portion of its workforce on Wednesday. Sources tell AdExchanger that the layoffs represent somewhere between 15% and 20% of the company, although more toward the lower end of that range. Samba confirmed the layoffs but declined to share how many people or what […]
Roku is sitting in a nice position as the streaming wars kick off. The OTT platform reported on Wednesday net revenue growth of 50% year over year to $260.9 million in Q3. And it will benefit from the proliferation of both ad-supported and non-ad-supported services. More high-profile streaming services will drive more engagement on Roku, […]
AT&T rolled out the red carpet for investors Tuesday in true Hollywood fashion – with a flashy event at Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank, California, to unveil its HBO Max streaming service. In a presentation resembling the upfronts, AT&T revealed that HBO Max will launch in the United States in May 2020 with 10,000 hours […]
With Disney+, Apple TV+, HBO Max and Peacock all hitting the market between this November and April 2020, streaming services will spend big on marketing to attract subscribers and compete for share. In this new landscape, networks will have to reevaluate whether to accept tune-in ads from competitive streaming services. TV networks mentioned in this […]
When Roku bought dataxu for $150 million on Tuesday, it said the deal would make it easier for buyers of all sizes to access OTT inventory at scale, and use Roku’s ID off platform. Roku is basically trying to make more inventory, powered with better data, available to advertisers, said Frank Sinton, president and founder […]
Roku’s $150 million purchase of dataxu illustrates the streaming giant’s vision to own and operate an open marketplace for OTT inventory. The deal, announced Tuesday, gives Roku a self-serve buying platform that hooks into both its own and other OTT premium video supply, as well as display and cross-platform media. That positions Roku to operate […]
There was a time when Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was glib when people asked about the competition. He’d point to sleep and video games like Fortnite as the streaming giant’s main rivals for attention. But on Netflix’s third quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Hastings was a lot less flip. “Disney will be a great competitor […]
Despite Xandr’s positioning as the TV platform of the future during its Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara last week, agency buyers want to see more progress toward that goal. Certainly, Xandr has the right assets and strategy to create a programmatic marketplace for TV. Over the past year, Xandr launched a publisher network called Community, […]
NCC Media, the sales consortium owned by Comcast, Cox and Charter, rebranded as Ampersand Monday and released a bunch of new products, including a data-driven linear TV platform. Here’s what you need to know. Data-driven platform TV targets audiences across local and national buys The new platform is designed to collect and anonymize data across […]
