Comcast’s acquisition of French video supply-side platform StickyAds on Monday will give its video ad tech division a serious boost. Comcast’s video ad server FreeWheel will be able to streamline the way big TV broadcasters allocate inventory by embedding StickyAds’ private exchange tech into its own video ad server. The capability will let FreeWheel’s TV […]
Updated with comment from FreeWheel’s CEO. Comcast has acquired StickyAds.tv, a French video ad tech startup focused on publishers. Re/code first reported the news Sunday night, and Comcast confirmed it Monday morning. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Business Insider claimed the deal was an all-cash transaction and worth “at least $100 million.” […]
YouTube reaches more 18- to 49-year-olds on mobile alone than any cable network or broadcaster, said Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, during Google’s glitzy Brandcast event Thursday night in New York City. She cited MAGNA Global’s $250 million upfront commitment to Google Preferred as evidence of the shift of brand TV dollars to digital. YouTube […]
Pandora’s Q1 2016 call on Thursday revealed that programmatic sales of display inventory drove increased sell-through rates. In an earnings release, Pandora claimed the buying method is “starting to contribute meaningfully” to advertising revenue per 1,000 ad-supported listener hours, which grew 19% year over year to $45.47, and take pressure off ad loads. Pandora made […]
Intuit has hired Mike Zeman, an architect of Netflix’s programmatic trading desk, to help grow its Mint personal finance brand. Zeman will serve as director of marketing and business development for Intuit’s Consumer Ecosystem Group, reporting to SVP Albert Ko. During his three years at Netflix, Zeman led digital marketing during a period of dramatic […]
CNN is signing on with comScore’s syndicated measurement service Xmedia, a competitive offering to Nielsen’s Total Audience measurement. Xmedia is designed to help media companies understand their cross-platform audiences by tracking unduplicated reach across TV, digital, set-top box and mobile properties. CNN now claims to have a total unduplicated audience of 174 million across TV, […]
Updated with statement from Amazon. Amazon’s forthcoming $8.99-a-month subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service offers strong new competition to Netflix and Hulu. Will it include advertising as well? Not at first, but there is an internal debate at Amazon around the proper role of ads in its video offering. According to one source with knowledge of Amazon’s […]
AOL rolled out a programmatic self-serve platform for TV buyers on Monday, and Omnicom Group is the first agency partner to test-drive it. While some competing solutions only enable planning, AOL said its platform also handles execution and reporting. AOL thinks its developing device graph under Verizon gives it a competitive advantage in omnichannel media […]
Sky Media, the advertising sales arm for British telecom and broadcaster Sky, sits at the crossroads of technology and strategic investment. A new partnership with multiscreen ad-delivery tool Yospace, unveiled last Wednesday, will support dynamic ad insertions in linear streams like sports, news and entertainment on both IP and OTT devices alongside Sky’s ad server, […]
AT&T has officially entered the programmatic TV fray. The carrier on Thursday revealed the launch of a private marketplace called the Video Inventory Platform (“VIP” for short), which Jason Brown, AT&T AdWorks’ VP of national advertising sales, told AdExchanger was a “data-optimized TV and video planning tool.” The product will be generally available in Q3 […]
When Apple baked tvOS into its fourth-generation set-top box, the next-gen operating system also opened the floodgates to third-party apps. It was a pivotal moment for app and game developers, who could for the first time tap into Apple’s emerging TV ecosystem via a new software development kit (SDK). And for large and mid-tier publishers, the new […]
If you hail from the northeastern United States, you’re probably accustomed to the slightly bitter bite of broccoli rabe common in many Italian dishes. It’s the population beyond New York and other big cities – as well as health-conscious millennials – to whom Salinas, Calif., grower Andy Boy wanted to appeal. But Andy Boy had […]
That day when data rewrites all TV business rules is not far off, said Joan Gillman, EVP and COO for Time Warner Cable’s media services. A cultural shift is already underway at sales houses as cable companies pitch TV 2.0 products to advertiser clients. Traditionally, buyers only got historic measurements and reporting for campaigns that […]
How about this for a premiere? Beginning this fall, all NBCUniversal inventory will be available for sale programmatically via the network’s private exchange NBCUx. Ahead of the upfronts, NBCUniversal has rolled out an offering called NBCUx for Linear TV, which will put additional data and automation in the hands of media planners to apply to […]
The extreme fragmentation of digital media is tougher on national political campaigns than on brand advertisers. Because political campaigns must fight for every vote (at least once the primaries are done), discrete audiences that a brand marketer might dismiss as too difficult or small are essential to the political advertiser. The 3% of American adults that still connect […]
Twentieth Century Fox’s new flick “Deadpool” shattered box office records over Valentine’s and President’s Day weekend, banking $135 million in the three days since its premiere. Although a popular Marvel comic (and actor Ryan Reynolds) certainly inspired that turnout, a week-long multiplatform activation from Viacom preceding the film’s launch helped generate awareness. Throughout the campaign’s […]
It may not be master over how its software is used, but that isn’t stopping Google from ruling its Play store with an iron first. It appears that some ad-blocking apps are not welcome. Taking a page out of Apple’s playbook, Samsung on Sunday rolled out support for content blocking within the default browser that […]
Comcast is losing fewer cable TV customers than it has in the past eight years. That’s no small feat, considering signs of rampant cord cutting inundating the broadcast industry. Comcast added 89,000 customers for video service Xfinity in the fourth quarter, the most of any quarter since 2006, according to its earnings release. Video revenue […]
Unlike earned digital media, which is reinventing political campaigns, presidential candidates tend to view digital video as support for their flashy TV advertising. “The hope for digital, in my opinion,” said John Randall, VP of digital at the right-leaning agency CRAFT, “is that by 2020 we don’t even see a difference between TV and online or mobile video ads. But […]
Automated guaranteed will color direct deals in TV in a big way, not just in digital, predicts Scott Braley, GM of programmatic at Telstra-owned video platform Ooyala. While traditional TV teams are accustomed to buying on a reserved basis, automated guaranteed deals could diversify the direct orders process. Broadcasters could subsequently gain more flexibility around […]
Watch out YouTube. Facebook is coming for your video ad honeypot. In his first week back in the saddle after the birth of his daughter Maxima, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors on the company’s Q4 earnings call that Facebook will explore the launch of a video-specific property, possibly an app that would compete with Google […]
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 […]
Starting in Q4, Reddit will test logged-in-only mode to protect its user engagement, improve ad targeting and keep AI from scraping its content.
DoorDash on Thursday confirmed the rumors and announced its intention to acquire Instacart at a $17 billion valuation.
Google earned $127.6 billion in Q3, up 25% year over year, practically all of which came from ads. Yet advertising hardly came up during its earnings call on Wednesday evening.
Meta now scores every eligible ad for every impression at more than a billion ads per second, one of three ad ranking upgrades Meta announced on Wednesday.
The agency services group Marketbridge added to its portfolio on Tuesday by announcing its acquisition of Channel99, a B2B advertising and attribution tech company.
The law-professional-to-queer-media-founder pipeline is not a particularly common one. But it’s exactly how Alia J. Daniels came to co-found Revry, a free streaming platform centering LGBTQ+ storylines.
