CTV

The state of programmatic TV: A patchwork of parts that need to come together in order to automate the broadcast ad buy. During a panel at Programmatic I/O in New York Wednesday, David Cooperstein, CMO of Simulmedia; Brent Horowitz, VP of business development at BrightRoll; Derek Mattsson, president and CEO of placemedia, Amanda Richman, president, Starcom USA […]

How bad a problem is online ad fraud, and how should the buy and sell sides divvy the responsibility to combat it? This question formed the crux of the panel “New Methods For Defeating Fraud In The Programmatic Era,” moderated by WPP’s Team Detroit chief digital officer, Kurt Unkel, at Wednesday’s Programmatic I/O conference in New […]

Each day, 7 million fans tune in to YouTube to see bubbly video blogger Bethany Mota make breakfast or braid her hair. The breakout video star draws tweens eager for a taste of Mota’s fashion and beauty must-haves, averaging 100 million minutes of video watched per month. She’s equally attractive to brand advertisers, clinching campaigns […]

Meredith Corp., the publisher of popular women’s interest titles like Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal, is getting into the television game. Over Labor Day weekend, Better Homes and Gardens debuted free, ad-supported programming compatible with connected devices from Samsung, LG, Sharp, Philips, Toshiba and Roku. Meredith worked with Net2TV’s Portico TV Service […]

One of the purposes of Deal ID is to allow buyers and sellers to negotiate deals that combine the personal touch of the direct sale with programmatic efficiency. But the Deal ID also has challenges around sell-side scalability and limitations in audience discovery for advertisers. Nevertheless, some industry experts say the Deal ID might help […]

Eighty-seven percent of brands and agencies plan to spend at least 50% more on programmatic buys of desktop display, mobile and video advertising in the next six months, according to a survey conducted by AOL Platforms of executives at 25 advertisers, 96 agencies and 56 publishers. Display’s growth is driven by access to premium formats and […]

AudienceXpress, a TV audience-buying platform and division of early addressable TV tech company Visible World, has named its first buy-side programmatic video partner: the newly public TubeMogul. As a result of the deal, media buyers using TubeMogul for digital video campaigns can now access select linear spots from AudienceXpress’s cable MSO and multichannel video programming […]

Rentrak sees surging interest in addressable TV advertising, according to Bill Livek, CEO of the audience measurement and data services firm. “We believe this will be a massive advertising category,” Livek remarked during the company’s quarterly earnings call Thursday. “The folks who are doing addressable campaigns, every time a brand runs a campaign they can […]

As mobile traffic grows, the stakes for advertisers also climb. This is especially true for a publisher like Time Inc., where mobile traffic increased 35% in six short months – from 39 million unique views in December to 53 million unique views in June. As more traffic shifts to mobile, “being able to provide more […]

Popular audio-recognition app Shazam, which has amassed 475 million users to date, set its sights on TV Tuesday with the release of a network sales platform called Resonate. Initial launch partners include: A&E, AMC, FUSE and dick clark productions. Kevin McGurn, the company’s chief revenue officer and former SVP of sales for Hulu, said television […]

Inventory is where it’s at for RockYou. The company, which recently pivoted away from game publishing to focus on becoming a programmatic in-game video ad network, has raised $10 million in funding from FastPay, a sort of anti-VC that extends credit lines to digital media companies. It plans to use the money to buy up […]

Updated with additional comment from SpotXchange CEO Mike Shehan and RTL. European entertainment network RTL Group announced Thursday it will acquire a 65% stake worth $144 million in video supply-side platform and programmatic marketplace SpotXchange. Depending on the performance of the company, RTL could acquire additional stake in the company through the terms of an earn-out […]

The root of the network business is drawing a large audience to attract advertisers. As digital video and device fragmentation have disrupted the value proposition of traditional TV, data has become the equalizer. This is one reason why the ABC Television Network is spearheading an initiative with 4C Insights, a Facebook and Twitter ads partner. […]

AT&T AdWorks, the advanced ads division of the telecom company, is baking two new data sources into its TV audience-targeting tool, TV Blueprint. One source – anonymous, aggregate data on some 70 million subscribers – gives advertisers working with AT&T the ability to reach people based on factors like device, operating system, whether or not […]

Yahoo finally has its video distribution platform. Following flirtations with Hulu, Dailymotion and NDN, the company pulled the trigger Friday on Rayv, an Israeli company focused on high-quality video. In a post on Yahoo-owned Tumblr, Yahoo’s VP of cloud platform and services, P.P.S. Narayan, described how the deal is meant to enhance Yahoo’s “underlying technology […]

ABC on Thursday appointed Mike Dean to the newly created post of VP of programmatic and data-driven sales. He will report to Pooja Midha, ABC’s SVP of digital ad sales and operations. Dean most recently served as VP of media platform sales and solutions for programmatic video ads platform Videology, which he joined in 2011 […]

Remember the scene in the movie “Kill Bill, Vol. 2“ where the vengeful heroine, the Bride, is buried alive in a coffin and has to pound her way out with her bare fists? That’s your video ad. It’s essentially trapped in a box and buried in the publisher’s web page, and whether it can get out […]

Adknowledge has acquired video analytics provider TriVu Media for an undisclosed sum, a move the former hopes will extend its ad targeting capabilities to YouTube advertising. The company is betting the big three sources of video inventory going forward will be native (by which CEO Ben Legg means inventory sold through a transparent network), Facebook […]

On Monday, the Media Rating Council’s (MRC) advisory to avoid buying in-browser video impressions on the basis of viewability will end. Although the MRC defines in-browser video viewability as an ad that is at least 50% in view for at least two continuous seconds, there’s little agreement in the industry on what, exactly, constitutes video […]

Hulu, Condé Nast Entertainment and other members of the digital video and television industry laid out their measurement and monetization challenges on Wednesday at VideoNuze’s Online Video Advertising Summit. Brands and publishers are well aware of the growing popularity of applying programmatic to direct buys. Hulu for instance has reportedly beta-tested a programmatic exchange for more […]

When Comcast’s ad sales division Spotlight revealed a partner deal with Rubicon Project earlier this month, it underscored the multiple system operator’s (MSO) push to power the TV buy through both programmatic and direct sales channels. It was a pivotal moment for Comcast. Digital advertisers for the first time could buy against 19 million subscribers […]

Scott Ferris, GM of television and video at Microsoft Advertising, has been in the video biz for around three decades. For seven of those years, Ferris has been at Microsoft, heading up its video business group. Most recently however, he’s taken the lead role in what Microsoft calls its Content and Entertainment business group, which […]

The big brands have woken up to programmatic buying, and will not be going back to sleep. The gang of marketers directly controlling their exchange-traded media platforms keeps getting larger. Its membership now includes Kimberly-Clark, Kellogg’s, American Express, Procter & Gamble, Allstate Insurance, 1-800-Flowers and Unilever. Mondelez International is the latest to seize a more […]

Audience measurement mainstay Rentrak paid homage to the staying power of programmatic when, on its Q4 earnings call just weeks ago, Vice Chairman and CEO Bill Livek credited automated advertising as a growing trend the company is now “catering to.” Rentrak has been on a tear of late, racking up headlines as a (perhaps less-publicized, […]

Following its glitzy, star-studded digital NewFront in April, AOL got down to business. It closed in on marketing attribution vendor Convertro the same day Google grabbed pure-play competitor Adometry in early May. Then it went shopping again, snapping up TV audience-targeting platform PrecisionDemand. AOL’s acquisitive behavior is not entirely surprising. The company is constructing an […]

Procter & Gamble’s reported push to automate 70-75% of digital ad buys by year’s end underscores the convergence of TV, CPG marketing and programmatic media. “The closer we can tie shopper cart data to media, the stronger we get,” said Jen Mennes, director of media and public relations for Post Foods, during The Advertising Research […]

A few weeks ago, Experian Marketing Services formally merged its Consumer Insights division with its Targeting division. The former, built from Simmons Market Research (providing brand and media outlet profiles) and Hitwise (providing competitive online analytics), is the intelligence arm; the latter is the execution arm. “Imagine seeing not just where ESPN.com traffic comes from […]

This upfront season, a number of media conglomerates flirted with programmatic TV. ABC, for instance, is beta testing data-driven ad sales via video ad server FreeWheel’s new FourFronts Programmatic tool. Likewise, NBCUniversal’s ad sales chief Linda Yaccarino has spoken of opening up portions of premium network inventory to programmatic sales. As marketer and media company interest […]

AOL’s Adap.tv will acquire Jon Mandel’s PrecisionDemand, a TV ad-targeting company that mines set-top box data and layers it with first-party data. In a Wednesday blog post outlining the acquisition, Adap.tv’s Toby Gabriner wrote: “Integrated into Adap.tv’s programmatic buying and selling platforms and, eventually, ONE by AOL, PrecisionDemand will be a key component of our […]

As the growing number of smart TVs and connected devices cause further fragmentation, de-duped cross-platform measurement has become the media planner’s imperative. Nielsen and comScore are answering the call by beefing up digital video and mobile integrations in their respective media measurement tools. Nielsen since 1950 has been inextricably linked to TV audience measurement, claiming access […]