Commerce

Adobe said Monday it will buy the ecommerce platform Magento for $1.68 billion. Magento’s 2017 revenue was $150 million, and the deal is expected to close by the end of August. Ecommerce has long been a big hole in Adobe’s tech, even as competitors spent heavily to acquire Magento’s competitors. SAP has owned hybris since […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Story Time Advertising is coming to Facebook Stories, a sleeper hit on the Facebook platform that draws 150 million daily active users. Ads will be 15- to 20-second videos that users can skip and are for now limited to branding initiatives, TechCrunch reports. Click-throughs […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Amazon Ad Revenue Accelerates Revenue in Amazon’s “Other” category grew 132% YoY to $2 billion this quarter, with advertising services making up a “majority” of that segment, CFO Brian Olsavsky said during the company’s earnings call Thursday. So it’s safe to say Amazon’s ad […]

AdRoll and Magento Commerce announced a partnership on Friday to combine the companies’ ecommerce platforms, incorporating AdRoll’s ad targeting and attribution directly into the Magento cloud management service for online sellers. Bay Alarm Medical, which sells medical alert systems, has been working with Magento for four years and with AdRoll for almost a decade, said […]

Brands like Uber, Ubisoft and Bayer have evolved their programmatic in-housing tactics in recent years – and all three outlined those changes at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference in San Francisco Wednesday. In the early days of in-housing, brands often bit off more than they could chew – or lacked the proper resources to implement and maintain […]

Because it can take a month or more to tie digital media to offline purchases, CPGs like Del Monte are used to relying on proxy metrics like viewability or engagement. But Del Monte is piloting an Amobee product released Wednesday called Sales Accelerator, which aims to collapse that timeline to about a week and help […]

Since Guillaume Lelait was promoted March 20 from Fetch’s US managing director to its first-ever US CEO, he’s inherited a wealth of operations and clients. He’s also inherited an ongoing lawsuit with former client Uber. Last September, Uber sued Fetch for $40 million after accusing the agency of buying click fraud to take credit for […]

Moen’s social marketing stack used to include everything but the kitchen sink. “We used seven-plus tools to facilitate our social media program and I always say ‘use’ is a very strong word because we certainly weren’t leveraging all those tools,” said Brittany Neish, senior social strategist for kitchen and bathroom fixture manufacturer Moen. And because […]

The almighty duopoly is losing share – but just a little bit. Google and Facebook will take a 56.8% share of US digital ad spend this year, down from 58.5% in 2017, according to a report published by eMarketer on Monday. The report also predicted the duopoly’s share of new digital ad dollars entering the […]

Here’s the central mystery of our time: What will Amazon let brands do on Alexa? That’s something dressing and ingredients manufacturer Hidden Valley is testing right now, via an integrated marketing product from Allrecipes designed to link its native inventory to grocery orders on AmazonFresh. Clorox-owned Hidden Valley and other grocery brands work with Allrecipes […]

Uber has the pedal to the metal when it comes to paid social automation. The ride-sharing app embeds performance marketing and paid social teams in every region where it does business. Four channel managers on each team make sure campaigns meet their objectives. On Facebook and Instagram, where Uber spends a significant portion of its […]

The world’s largest consumer product brands are struggling to grow their US businesses. While some of the challenges are macro-economic, like increased transportation costs, the biggest factor is the growth of retail private-label brands, which can’t be acquired or stamped out like startup competitors. Large CPGs are also adjusting to new direct-to-consumer and ad-heavy startup […]

Amazon has become part of virtually every media plan and it’s only going to continue to grow. Yet, Amazon’s advertising business remains an enigma. Even its closest partners aren’t exposed to the inner workings of its ad stack. It’s also not clear how much spend flows through Amazon’s ad platform, though the investment bank BMO […]

Albertsons has unleashed shopper data from its network of 2,300 stores to help CPG advertisers determine whether their digital ad spend drove sales. When the grocery chain, whose numerous brands include Safeway, launched Albertsons Performance Media last week, it joined retailers like Target, Kroger and Walmart, which have each invested in building an audience activation […]

Paris-based ecommerce analytics platform ContentSquare has raised a $42 million Series B round from a series of investors including US VC firm Canaan and Highland Europe. ContentSquare previously had raised $20 million, bringing it to a total of $62 million after this round. The company will use the financing to support research and development of […]

Procter & Gamble isn’t done trimming its agency and advertising investments, even after a year of deep cuts to media and production budgets, according to senior managers during the company’s Q2 earnings report on Tuesday. Digital media and tech vendors have become more transparent since P&G began crusading against online supply chain failures a year […]

“Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer’s point of view. Today’s column is written by Bennett Rosenblatt, rider display marketing lead at Uber. At Uber, our programmatic strategy prioritizes transparency and trust above all. We run campaigns in an enterprise self-service demand-side platform (DSP) and leverage a transparent ad server to […]

Online retailers are losing revenue right under their noses thanks to a devious form of ad injection only visible to infected site visitors. “I didn’t even know we had a problem,” said Jason LeBoeuf, director of ecommerce at athletics footwear brand Asics. The Asics website was the victim of customer-journey hijacking, a sneaky practice by […]

L’Oreal will expand a media ownership strategy it piloted in Mexico to other Spanish-speaking countries to generate first-party cookies from its customer base. The idea is similar to sponsored content, but instead of working with a brand-name media company on a story package, for the past year L’Oreal has developed fiufiu, a kind of pop-up […]

For those whose New Year’s wish was never to see the word “duopoly” again: Take cheer! Soon we may start talking about the “triopoly” instead. Amazon’s $1 billion to $2 billion per year in ad revenue in 2017, according to eMarketer estimates, may be a pittance to the tens of billions earned by Google or […]

With the explosion of cross-screen TV, publishers and advertisers are clamoring for better discovery, personalization and cataloging of video content, and metadata is answering that call. Metadata, put simply, adds more context to data. Metadata in video can range from the contents of that video (e.g., colors, products, characters) to the way it’s classified (e.g., […]

Edible Arrangements is best known for its fresh fruit and chocolate arrangements, many of which are gifted at the last minute for holidays or anniversaries. Although 65% of Edible Arrangement’s business comes from ecommerce, the brand wants to drive visits – particularly from repeat customers – into its 1,200 local store franchises. “No one’s going […]

Since it began delivering makeup product lines in 2015, the London-based beauty startup Wunder2 demonstrates how savvy ecommerce companies can use Facebook targeting and video campaigns to push into retail distribution. Wunder2 follows in the footsteps of Facebook-centric startup brands like the mattress-in-a-box manufacturer Purple, which landed its first retail distribution deal last month, and […]

The revelation that Kroger is developing a data-driven ad platform, Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM), to launch next year underscores how brick-and-mortars are trying to exert control over their data in the same manner as an ecommerce company. Yet the goal of a true brick-and-mortar walled garden is fraught with challenges. For decades, retailers sold anonymized […]

Champagne used to be reserved for special occasions, but Moet Hennessy USA wants consumers to see its luxury products as more of an everyday utility. The company teamed up with its creative agency, Rehab, and Amazon’s voice-activated service, Alexa, to create Bottles and Bubbles, a customized “skill” or application. Once users command Alexa to “open […]

Since 2011, ecommerce startup BarkBox has been delivering boxes of toys and treats to dogs and their owners. The six-year-old subscription service has half a million subscribers, became profitable in Q1 and is projected to reach $150 million in revenue for 2017. In August, BarkBox brought on Bank of America marketing vet Jay Livingston as […]

Big consumer product brands like L’Oreal have soaked up as much data as possible in recent years as they try to assemble consumer profiles without the direct data enjoyed by ecommerce merchants and retailers. Doing so requires a multifaceted strategy. L’Oreal’s head of data acquisitions and partnerships, Aruna Paramasivam, described her company’s efforts along these […]

Online display advertising spend in the US will grow 70% from $42 billion this year to $72 billion by 2021, propelled mostly by social media ad spend, according to Forrester’s annual Online Display Advertising forecast, released Wednesday. As mobile adoption continues to surge, Forrester predicted, social ad spend will reach $40 billion by 2021, and […]

Amazon wants to own a greater chunk of the video supply chain. Its cloud division, Amazon Web Services, released a suite of video tools called AWS Elemental Media Services on Monday, designed to help live and on-demand video content providers manage workflow. It is available only as a managed service for now. “We’re trying to […]

Activist investor Nelson Peltz of Trian Fund Management won a recount vote for a board seat at Procter & Gamble. In the wake of the early October vote, the initial vote count had Peltz down by a narrow margin, but that now appears to be wrong. In a statement shared with AdExchanger late Wednesday, the […]