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Content-distribution network Akamai sold its Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS) business to Mediamath earlier this year. Many assumed the move marked the end of Akamai’s involvement in the ad business. Not so. Soon after it auctioned off its ADS assets, Akamai focused on video ads when it launched its Ad Integration Services in February. Part of […]

This morning NBC Universal entered a strategic partnership with Comcast and Twitter to engineer a “See It” feature allowing Xfinity TV viewers to take action around a TV show from their Twitter stream. The integration allows Xfinity TV viewers to take actions such as starting a show on-demand or setting a DVR to record. Executives […]

Twitter is in New York this week talking up Amplify, which is at the heart of the company’s monetization strategy around broadcast content. The Amplify program offers audience extension for TV networks by letting them tweet short video clips such as sports replays minutes or seconds after their on-air broadcast. Broadcast advertisers can “ride along” […]

Advertising across devices and bridging the gap between online and offline campaigns should be key components of every marketer’s strategy, according to Lisa Utzschneider, Amazon.com’s global VP of sales, who outlined the ecommerce giant’s marketing tactics yesterday at the Dmexco conference. Amazon’s customer strategy is based on three rules: “Start with the customer and work backwards, […]

While audience measurement giants Nielsen and comScore have scrambled to meet online ad industry demands around TV’s gross ratings points, WPP Group’s Kantar Media has concentrated more narrowly on “return path data” – metrics derived from pay TV boxes. While talk of addressable TV (aka advanced or “targeted TV”) has floated around for over a […]

NBC News has acquired the user-generated live video service Stringwire, in addition to hiring the startup’s founder, Phil Groman. Stringwire’s technology allows NBC News to gather video footage from the public more efficiently, but the technology poses challenges from an advertising standpoint. When Twitter users tweet about a news event, NBC News will be able […]

Adap.tv was not the only video company to have a good day yesterday. On the same day that AOL snapped up video-ad marketplace Adap.tv for $405 million, digital ad management provider DG saw its stock shoot up 25% to $10.31 at yesterday’s closing bell. Although DG rescheduled its earnings call from Wednesday afternoon to Thursday, […]

AOL is not taking its foot off the programmatic gas pedal, and agencies are impressed. The $405-million acquisition of video ad platform Adap.tv sheds new light on other recent developments, including the hire of Razorfish’s global CEO Bob Lord to lead AOL Networks and a planned “programmatic upfront” event in September. Their obvious conclusion: AOL’s […]

AOL has agreed to buy video-ad company Adap.tv in a deal that will add another arrow to the programmatic quiver, with products facing both the buy and sell side. Adap.tv is one of a handful of mature companies, alongside YuMe, Tremor Video and TubeMogul, that are seizing the digital video opportunity. Its revenue growth has […]

If there was any doubt of Twitter’s impact on TV ratings and viral viewership, new findings from Nielsen may help dispel it. Nielsen, which recently ran time series analysis of 221 broadcast prime-time episodes through Nielsen SocialGuide, found that Live TV ratings played a statistically significant role in related tweets for 48% of the episodes. […]

“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jeremy Steinberg, senior vice president of digital ad sales for The Weather Company. You know a big storm is brewing, but you’re not quite sure from which direction it will come or how it will […]

With Tremor Video taking its video-advertising technology company to the public markets this week – and YuMe preparing to follow suit — AdExchanger reached out to ad-tech industry veteran Dave Morgan to discuss the implications. Morgan, who founded TACODA and Real Media, has experienced the whims of the public markets.  To be sure, Morgan has an interest […]

Earlier this year we noted that investment company JMG Exploration, the parent company of the ad network AdVantage Networks, had acquired travel ad network Travora Media and rebranded itself as MediaShift. AdExchanger caught up with Brendon Kensel, MediaShift’s president, to talk about the company’s first launch since the acquisition and its strategy for monetizing Wi-Fi […]

In pitching the marketer-centric audience at Merkle’s customer summit about the benefits of  DIRECTV’s addressable televison advertising product, the company’s VP of Advanced Advertising, Tom Hagopian, identified two of its challenges, too.  The first was the limited scale of the addressable TV market.  The second… “On the TV buying side, we are constantly involved in […]

Addressable TV ads company Visible World is working with FourthWall Media to make it easier for cable operators to deploy Household Addressable TV Advertising across any of the major cable operators’ set-top boxes. FourthWall Media purchased digital TV ad management platform Navic from Microsoft in May 2012. Following that deal, Navic was folded into FourthWall’s […]

Aol wants to be the “new TV.” During its lavish NewFront presentation last month, it pressed the message “We’re ready for primetime” – that is, primetime TV ad spending. Today the company released a survey of 770 ad industry executives on the migration of TV spend to digital video. Respondents indicated plans to shift spend […]

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Greg Corso, Vice President of Media Solutions at dunnhumbyUSA.  In Dr. Seuss’ The Butter Battle Book, the Yooks are separated from the Zooks by a wall, an arbitrarily drawn […]

ESPN unveiled results of its first advertising “hackathon” at its cable network upfront presentation this week. The hackathon event divided ESPN staffers into groups and charged them with developing new ad solutions that would be presented to six judges and 250 other employees. Marketers and media buyers were given a preview of some of the […]

Following on the heels of Facebook’s announced plans to introduce video ads to its News Feed, Moontoast, a rich media ad platform provider, and the video platform VideoGenie unveiled a new partnership today that will also enable advertisers to insert videos into the social network’s News Feed. Moontoast is a Facebook-preferred marketing developer and winner […]

As Heineken continues its discussions with ad sellers from broadcast, cable and digital for those outlets’ respective “upfronts,” the beer marketer is looking to tie its campaigns more closely among TV and the web. While there’s nothing unusual about that, the company, which also owns the Newcastle and Dos Equis beer brands, is working with […]

Smartphones – and Apple’s iPhone in particular – may seem ubiquitous in the US (see AdExchanger’s Q1 mobile RTB report). Yet worldwide, Samsung beat out Apple and Android-based smartphone sales in the first quarter 2013, according to Gartner. Gartner found 426 million mobile phones were sold in the first quarter, up 0.7% from Q1 2012. Worldwide smartphone […]

Mediaocean, fresh from striking a collaboration with digital video rights manager FreeWheel for handling Aol’s ad inventory across TV and online, has just netted an even bigger assignment – Comcast. The media buying workflow software company will be in charge of processing ad buys for Comcast AdDelivery, the cable operator’s cloud-based tool for distributing spot TV. It’s […]

“Can the TV upfronts work in digital, too?” This is a question the Wall Street Journal’s Nina Lawrence gets to consider after she and her WSJ team present their wares at today’s Digital Content NewFronts, produced by the IAB. With only five months under her belt as VP of Global Marketing and Advertising Sales, after […]

MailOnline’s site is an endless broadsheet of breaking news, tabloid gossip and tawdry thrills (pictured: the money a stripper makes in just ONE shift – and it’s more than most people make in a month). Some might consider this publishing format tailor-made for real-time bidding. But the site, which has its own dedicated editorial and […]

“I hear people say I can buy premium video content wherever I want. Then at the other end, I hear people say there’s not enough. And they say that they can’t even buy data on top of it, because the minute you apply data to premium, the cake becomes smaller and smaller. This is why […]

The Weather Company, owner of The Weather Channel and its digital extensions, unveiled a plan to bring more addressability to its TV advertising. Dubbed “CableFX,” the new offering from the company’s WeatherFX Division brings existing “big data” to its local and regional TV targeting system. The idea  is to more closely bridge TWC’s TV, web, […]

Among the key questions for video ad buyers are these two: Did anyone see my ad? And did my ad run where it was supposed to? Without a set of standardized measurements for viewability and verification, companies have been forced to cobble together various technologies to gain insight into their investments. Video ad server Vindico […]

Mobile and video are the fastest growing segments of display – eMarketer has video’s growth rates rising 46.5% for 2012, while it says smartphone based ad spending will jump 180% this year to top $4 billion. And yet, aside from Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Hulu, there are very few sites that can truly make the claim […]

Last week’s news out of the Consumer Electronics Show that Time Warner Cable had struck a deal with streaming video delivery device Roku had ad industry attendees wondering whether “over-the-top” TV was near to having an advertising moment. So we put the question to a mix of video ad observers: “Given news such as this […]

Analysts expect real-time bidding to account for between 25% and 50% of total display ad spend by 2015. Meanwhile the video RTB space is growing at an even faster clip, but not accounting for as much media investment — yet. “We do see RTB in video but it is still early, for everyone from ad […]