The British broadcaster Sky Media on Monday announced a $10 million investment in the DSP and DMP provider DataXu. Sky hopes the relationship will help it better understand programmatic advertising, said Jamie West, Sky Media’s deputy managing director, in a release. “The money substantiates the belief in each other’s companies,” said DataXu CRO Ed Montes […]
Advertisers are embracing Instagram, with its video and direct-response potential gaining particular interest, according to a new report from social advertising and content marketing firm Brand Networks. CPG, fashion and retail advertisers in particular have been quick to embrace Instagram, which proved to be a significant player over the 2015 holiday season. The study examined more […]
AudienceXpress, a TV planning and buying platform Comcast acquired last summer via its purchase of parent Visible World, is opening up new programmatic TV tools to several agencies, including Horizon and US International. These tools include a self-serve platform and direct APIs, AudienceXpress’ first major product launch since the Comcast acquisition. The beta will last through the […]
Acxiom has released an addressable TV product, built from a segmentation platform it acquired in early December from the Allant Group. The tool, announced this week at CES, leverages Acxiom’s workflow automation software and its relationships with multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs). It’s not meant to execute on media buys. “We’re on a mission to […]
Video buyers see a future where they can bundle new-wave TV ad inventory – including VOD and connected TV – with linear television buys. But the “CTV” impression pool is still too shallow for many agencies and brands to bother. “We’re not going to scrape for impressions on some new 5 million-subscriber video startup,” said […]
True[X], the video ad platform Fox acquired last December, partnered Tuesday with Comcast’s TV ad-serving platform FreeWheel to bring more “engagement-based” video ads to broadcasters. The deal will give True[X] greater sell-in among FreeWheel’s base of media and entertainment brands, which include NBCUniversal, Turner Broadcasting, Viacom, Sky, DirecTV and ABC. True[X] creates interactive video ad […]
Glenfiddich, a family-owned maker of single-malt Scotch whisky, is among the first advertisers to place an addressable TV buy through DISH Network’s new programmatic marketplace, which launched in October. Glenfiddich’s media planning and buying agency, Resolute Digital, is using Rocket Fuel’s demand-side platform to serve an addressable, 30-second TV spot to the brand’s target audience […]
Shoppable video is still a novel concept, despite the industry’s efforts to move it into the mainstream (with Google launching shoppable video on YouTube being the most recent example). But NBCUniversal’s Bravo TV still sees the value of shoppable video. The network wanted to expand its digital business and encourage fans to return to its properties on […]
If you’re a large brand and you want 10 million guaranteed impressions, you’re not going to find it in episodic TV – yet. Adobe and Videology, through new over-the-top video ad sales and the yield management system Adobe Primetime TV Media Management, hope to solve this problem. The solution was released Tuesday during Videonuze’s programmatic […]
The emergence of data-enabled TV targeting is altering the agency buying structure. In 2014, WPP’s GroupM launched Modi Media, a unit that would become the poster child for so-called “advanced” TV ad buying. But it’s not the only agency group to build an offering geared to the fragmenting milieu of TV advertising. Others, such as […]
In 2014, American Express boldly declared in an RFP to ad tech vendors that it wanted to programmatically transact 100% of its then $128.5 million display budget. Though the statement was later clarified to be more of an aspiration than a brand-wide target, the financial services giant was one of several large brands exerting greater control over exchange-based buys at […]
YouTube’s TrueView has trained viewers to count backward from five – and then click “skip.” It’s a now-ingrained behavior that traditional and even nontraditional publishers like Norway’s VGTV are trying to grapple with. That’s because pre-roll engagement rates are the pits – and they often have an unfortunate effect on the engagement rate for whatever content […]
Interactive video ad server Innovid has rolled out a programmatic creative tool designed to let agencies and advertisers personalize video messages across devices. This capability is driven, in part, by Innovid’s experience tackling different ad-serving requirements through a series of connected TV partnerships. Innovid entered an audience solutions agreement with Roku in the summer, which […]
While the rise of subscription video services won’t lure all consumers away from ad-supported offerings, it represents a disruption to current business models – partially driven by ad blocking and consumer demand for better experiences. “If you think about all of the content we consume that is supported by an advertising model, if a consumer […]
“Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer’s point of view. Today’s column is by Tony Ralph, director of advertising technology at Netflix. Every time I open a mobile web browser I’m reminded of Wirth’s law. Wirth’s law postulates that software becomes slower more quickly than hardware grows faster. Mobile hardware advances […]
Clypd and SpotX, two sell-side systems for TV and digital publishers, have jointly launched a cross-screen monetization platform for media owners. TiVo will be the pair’s first data partner, enabling platform users to anonymously match digital ad exposures to national households across TiVo’s 2.5 million set-top boxes. The goal is to allow an advertiser or […]
NBCUniversal transacted 10-15% of its digital business programmatically during the 2015-2016 season, the company has revealed to AdExchanger. Prior to the upfronts, the company expected to secure 50% of commitments on a “converged” basis, with elements of both TV and digital in a single deal. In this most recent upfront, NBCUniversal’s digital business grew 50% and, of […]
DISH Network is subscribing to the programmatic playbook, enabling greater automation and data application for buyers bidding on addressable TV spots. The satellite pay-TV provider, representing 8 million addressable households nationwide, on Monday debuted a programmatic marketplace and supply-side platform running on IPONWEB. Its initial demand partners are Rocket Fuel, TubeMogul and DataXu. After an […]
Television may be a little late to the programmatic party, but addressable TV promises to blend performance efficiencies with proven sales lift – and that’s changing the face of the TV buy. Media agencies were historically agents of the upper funnel, but data and technology are redefining the awareness and consideration phase. “A client used […]
TV has long proven to be an effective channel for Ancestry.com, a provider of genealogical software and services with more than 2 million subscribers. And 1 million have purchased its DNA testing product, AncestryDNA. Commercials advertising Ancestry are meant to be emotional and explain the value of using the family history search site and DNA […]
Toyota Motors is a big TV spender. It bought, according to Kantar Media, three minutes of commercial airtime during Super Bowl XLIX –trailing only Anheuser-Busch and Fiat Chrysler. Although Toyota will continue to invest in big TV tent poles, it’s test-driving more digital video activation, and is sponsoring premium NBCUniversal video running on AOL’s network. […]
Sony Pictures TV thinks there’s power in remaining subscription-free. In the case of its free streaming premium video network Crackle, which clocks 22 million monthly uniques, it promises brand partners a 93% ad completion rate and an engaged audience. Sony Crackle in April staged its first upfront presentation. “Because we see ourselves as a TV […]
Nielsen’s having a tough week. On Tuesday, comScore and Rentrak, two of Nielsen’s top competitors, announced their intention to merge into a single measurement monolith. And on Thursday, business channel CNBC, a division of NBCUniversal, will officially kick Nielsen to the curb, turning instead to research firm Cogent Reports for its audience measurement. Comcast-owned NBCUniversal […]
Altice continued a string of acquisitions on Thursday when the Amsterdam-based telecommunications giant announced that it would buy Cablevision for $17.7 billion. The Cablevision sale comes six months after Altice’s first move into the US market, when the company bought Suddenlink Communications, a regional cable operator based in St. Louis, for $9.1 billion. Altice has […]
“Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer’s point of view. Today’s column is by Mike Zeman, director of global programmatic marketing at Netflix. Imagine you’ve walked into a convenience store to buy some milk. The cashier says, “That’ll be $5.” You hand him a $5 bill, only to be told, “I’m […]
More than 32,000 will congregate in Cologne, Germany, this week to spark a dialogue about the connected consumer and the state of the digital media economy. Among those gathered here will be MasterCard’s chief marketing officer, Raja Rajamannar, who will join a bevy of global agency and platform execs at the yearly Digital Marketing Exposition […]
DataLab USA, a boutique analytics firm that works mostly with financial services and insurance companies, is betting on advancing addressable TV through customized algorithms. “Our role in the data world is to aggregate all the aggregators,” explained Alex Aigner, DataLab Digital’s COO. “We’ve commoditized how we build custom algorithms. Whether those algorithms are used for […]
Comcast’s drumbeat of new video services is designed to support content parity across devices rather than to create a cord cutter’s alternative, per se. The cable giant recently rolled out to Xfinity Internet customers a $15-a-month streaming video service appropriately dubbed Stream. Comcast has also flirted with a Web video portal to rival YouTube and […]
Connected TV ads have piqued marketers’ interest, but there is not a watershed of demand – yet – as marketers still cite measurement and inventory challenges. According to a joint study released by the Association of National Advertisers and BrightLine, the maker of an interactive video ad server built exclusively for the connected TV space, […]
Beginning this fall, advertisers will be able to programmatically buy Hulu video inventory in a private marketplace across desktop, mobile and connected TV via Facebook’s LiveRail supply-side platform. In its Tuesday announcement, Hulu said it will also use Oracle’s data-management platform (née BlueKai), through which marketers can enrich their buys by combining their anonymized first-party […]
Agencies are differentiating their tech stacks by building custom agentic AI tools for their clients. And they’re rethinking owning those AI tools – particularly since licensing them creates new revenue streams.
Agencies and marketers discussed the future of AI governance at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO NYC this week. The main takeaway? Expect insurers to play an increasingly important role in managing AI compliance.
The Trade Desk is unable to serve ads to the Safari browser for Apple device owners that have downloaded iOS 27. Apple has been investigating the issue since last week.
The open web is done, stick a fork in it. Banner blindness is near universal, search traffic has run dry and publishers are struggling for oxygen. But what if that’s … not true?
Attention, publishers: Although you might not think of yourself as a data broker, in the great state of New Jersey, that’s not really your call anymore.
MMM can tell marketers what worked, but Lifesight’s open-sourced forecasting tool aims to tell them what to do next.
