Commerce

In the face of a potential global recession on top of a horrendous year for ad tech stocks, companies have to find comfort in the small victories. Wednesday was one such victory for Criteo, despite a few troubling trends.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Speak Softly, And Carry A Big Tech Big Tech is on the defensive in the US, where it’s become politically popular to take shots at Alphabet, Meta and Amazon. But events that have transpired over the past year abroad demonstrate how powerful those […]

DoubleVerify’s Q2 revenue grew 43% year-over-year to $109.8 million. CEO Mark Zagorski says the company’s growth is due to both its revenue diversification into new types of advertising and its market position in the verification space, both of which make DoubleVerify “largely agnostic to shifts in ad spend and CPM volatility.”

Many publishers are betting big on seller-defined audiences (SDA) as a centerpiece of their post-third-party-cookie monetization plans. Problem is, although publishers are eager to test the performance of SDAs, there’s still very little demand from the buy side. AdExchanger spoke with ad agencies and buy-side tech platforms to get their side of the story.

If another war breaks out, if Apple tightens the screws even more on targeted advertising, if shopping shifted: Amazon would still report strong and healthy earnings. Q2 this year is no exception. Earlier this week, Facebook reported its first-ever drop in year-over-year ad revenue and Alphabet hosted a defensive investor call, during which the C-suite […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Googling Through The Headlines Google flooded the zone with news and interviews this week.  On the transparency front, one announcement that will impact ad tech is Google Ad Manager’s new “Revenue Verification Report.” GAM, the Google SSP, will look into buy-side gross revenue […]

General Mills is going deep on its first-party data strategy. Heather Conneran, director of brand experience platforms, shares the CGP marketer’s lessons learned from its time in the digital transformation trenches.

Over the past two years, data clean rooms have exploded onto the programmatic advertising scene, and they’re already at the center of some of the most exciting new partnerships and growth opportunities. But despite their rapid adoption, the definition of what a data clean room is – and all of the related nuance – is not well understood.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Through The Tube Nielsen has another horse in the measurement race, and this one’s name is Good Ol’ YouTube. Nielsen’s new Four-Screen Ad Deduplication product allows media buyers to compare their reach on YouTube across desktop, mobile, CTV and their linear audiences to reduce […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Pronounced She-In, As In “Ooh … She In Trouble Now” The fast-fashion company Shein, a gigantic but secretive Chinese manufacturer of fast fashion, is getting a lot of attention. Which Shein both does and does not want.  On the plus side, Shein has […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Game-Changer The NFL has a history of media and marketing innovation. If we’re keeping score, it was the first sports league to reach every TV in America, the first to invest in studio-style production and the first to mic players on the field. […]

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is coming to the European Union. But rest assured – it will have implications for United States brands, too. The DMA will implement a clear set of rules prohibiting tech giants, including Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple, from engaging in specific practices that might be viewed as “anti-competitive.” While it seems that the act aims to create a fair playing field, the actual outcomes may be more nuanced, writes Chris Comstock, chief product officer of Claravine.

DTC brands are struggling to get by without the Facebook ad engine. Legacy brands are flummoxed by ecommerce. One company that’s hoping to split the difference is RoC Skincare, which spun out of Johnson & Johnson and was acquired by the private equity firm Gryphon in 2018.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. No Compromise For Google Google’s reported offer to US regulators as a bid to avoid an antitrust suit was to spin off part of its ad business. But that news apparently landed with a thud.  The Department of Justice is poised to move […]

There’s a disconnect between those ad buyers in the trenches of online advertising and their own corporate leaders up the C-suite, who are accustomed to determining marketing group budgets based on ROI and other basic advertising KPIs that, frankly, are going haywire right now. One way to deal with that disconnect is to add someone who speaks both languages, as it were.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Get The Net Netflix isn’t just vetting third-party vendors for its pre-launch ad business (though it is vetting vendors, to be clear).  The streaming leader is on the hunt for an executive to lead its incubating advertising business, The Wall Street Journal reports.  […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Can A Tiger Change Its Stripes? Google offered to split its ad tech business into a stand-alone company (owned by Alphabet) as a concession to divert an antitrust suit, The Wall Street Journal reports. It’s unclear which products Google would transfer – although […]

Commerce and creator monetization are Pinterest’s two main priorities right now, said Jeremy King, the company’s SVP and head of engineering. King, who is also the former CTO of Walmart’s ecommerce business – he joined Pinterest in 2019 – said that the convergence of creator revenue potential with social media-based shopping and product discovery by consumers “will make Pinterest functional, versus purely inspirational.”

“We saw the rise and fall that can happen if you’re dependent on digital advertising,” said Bryan Porter, Simple Modern’s co-founder and chief ecommerce officer. “It worked really well for us … until it didn’t.” The experience of surfing an online ad wave and then crashing hard on the beach has shaped Simple Modern’s marketing strategy, which is fully in-housed

Video games can support intrinsic or native in-game ads, as well as ads that are delivered alongside gameplay but exist outside the game itself, like pause-menu display ads and rewarded video. Marketers can also sponsor and advertise on channels related to gaming, such as at esports events and across online streaming platforms, particularly Twitch and YouTube. And we can’t forget about the metaverse.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Paid Upfront NBCUniversal says this year’s upfronts was its highest-grossing since Comcast acquired the programmer in 2013.  Unsurprisingly, streaming media helped break the record. Of NBCU’s $7 billion in ad commitments, per a release, $1 billion is earmarked for its AVOD service Peacock […]

Two years ago, shortly after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Nike doubled down on what it refers to as its Consumer Direct Acceleration. Nike wasn’t simply weathering a storm, but taking COVID-19’s worldwide shakeup of consumer buying habits as an opportunity to rethink its business “by expanding our digital advantage, reshaping the marketplace of the future and creating deeper, more direct consumer relationships,” CFO Matthew Friend told investors.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Personalization Delusion The ability to dynamically scale creative and A/B test dozens – even hundreds – of ad campaign permutations, all potentially targeting specific audience types, has led marketers away from making a single piece of creative that stands alone and appeals to as […]

With more eyes on consumer privacy than ever before, data clean rooms have become one of the hottest technologies in marketing when it comes to secure, modern data collection. But as clean rooms come to the forefront, many brands are finding that building and working with this technology requires a little acumen and a lot of planning. St.Clair McLean, VP of infrastructure and security at Alliant, shares three clean room approaches to consider as brands look to align the right capabilities with their needs.

The grocery chain Albertsons in-housed its advertising services and tech business in February, and is still making big changes to the group. “It’s really about owning the tech stack and the product vision,” said Evan Hovorka, head of retail media products.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Shopify Is ‘Just Browsing’ Ads Shopify held its twice-annual road map update event this week. Shopify Editions, as the get-together is called, offered up a handful of tantalizing tidbits for industry observers awaiting news of a consolidated Shopify ad platform.  In May, there […]

Shopify seller turned ad tech CEO and entrepreneur Regina Ye founded her startup, Topsort, last year to help retailers launch auction-based ads on their sites through an API. Performance advertising shouldn’t be so hard for smaller brands, Ye says, on this week’s episode.

Sam’s Club, the membership-based retailer owned by Walmart, recently rebranded its advertising business as the Member Access Platform (MAP) as it charts its own course alongside other emerging retail media platforms. The notion of “member access” is what sets Sam’s Club apart from other retailers that are focused entirely on advertising as a way to monetize customers, said Lex Josephs, a VP at Sam’s Club and GM of the MAP business.

Marriott is one among a platoon of non-advertising companies that have launched programmatic ad platforms lately. Just don’t call Marriott’s new platform a retail media network. “I wouldn’t put us in that category,” said Elizabeth Donovan, global director and head of ad revenue for the Marriott Media Network. “We are a travel media network and I think more like a publisher, too.”

Two years of sweeping disruptions – supply-chain shortages, staffing challenges, fluctuating COVID regulations and looming inflation – were tough on consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers and retailers. But consumers are eager to shop in stores again. As data across touch points converge, marketers have the power to elevate customer experience and increase conversions, writes Gila Wilensky, president of Xaxis US.