About 18 months ago, data services provider Experian Marketing Services sought a new line of business: agencies. Given Experian’s legacy in marketing data, that seems relatively recent. But Kevin Dean, president and GM of targeting at Experian, has an explanation: “The advent of programmatic and addressability has created an environment where brands are as interested […]
The Weather Co.’s recently appointed chief revenue officer, Carrie Seifer, will oversee more than media sales in her new role. Responsible for B2B and B2C sales efforts across The Weather Co.’s properties, Seifer will tap Weather’s robust location and weather data sets to help clients streamline business processes like supply chain logistics. Parent company IBM’s […]
All telcos acquire ad tech to drive revenue, but not all telcos think alike on how to make that happen. Operators divide into four primary schools of thought when it comes to activating their ad tech assets: open ecosystem, closed ecosystem, internal promotion and content distribution. Singaporean SingTel, for example, is willing to partner with […]
The US Senate on Thursday voted down Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations that would have required internet service providers to get users to consent to be targeted by advertisers. The law would have required the providers (ISPs) to get explicit consent from users before allowing advertisers to buy or target against web browsing histories, geolocation, […]
Gracenote on Thursday rolled out its first update under new owner Nielsen, which bought it for $560 million in December. The offering is an entertainment database that combines its video, music and sports metadata offerings. The company is betting metadata will play a larger part in media monetization. Gracenote tags the programming content it tracks […]
Nielsen Catalina Solutions’ (NCS) original value prop focused on connecting media consumption with in-store sales for CPG brands. But in the past two years, NCS has moved beyond attribution and into building programmatic audience segments. Programmatic targeting is already almost 25% of NCS’ business, with a revenue goal this year between $20 million and $25 […]
Ghostery has decided not to have its cake and eat it too. On Wednesday, the company announced that it’s been acquired in an all-cash deal by Cliqz, a German privacy-focused browser that plans to use the ad-tracker tool to help expand its user base. The companies did not disclose a deal price. Hubert Burda Media, […]
Most marketers know they need data management platforms and a growing number have either already implemented one or plan to do so soon. Yet marketers in some industries, such as manufacturing and education, are seriously lagging in DMP adoption, according to a survey released Tuesday by market research firm The Relevancy Group. Forty-one percent of […]
When Epsilon parent Alliance Data reported full-year 2016 earnings last Thursday, CFO Charles Horn said “the old ValueClick business” was “a three-point drag on Epsilon’s revenue growth.” Horn was referring to Conversant’s ad network business before it rebranded to pivot toward ad tech in 2014, said Epsilon and Conversant CEO Bryan Kennedy. “It’s probably 4% […]
Data management is like dental hygiene: No one enjoys doing it or even thinking about it, but you’ve got to stay on top of it or else the situation will get really messy really quickly. Joanna O’Connell, CMO of MediaMath, on Thursday moderated a panel about data management that felt like a good cleanse. […]
The Chinese ad tech acquisition drumbeat continues. On Wednesday, Shanghai-based private equity firm Innotech bought data aggregator and discrepancy management company Ad-Juster. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but industry sources told AdExchanger the sale was well within the eight-figure range. Even at the potential high end, that doesn’t touch the astonishing deal prices […]
[pullquote][/pullquote]Zeotap is banking on 2017 being the year that telcos make their impact on the advertising world. The mobile data platform and telco data onboarder revealed its $12.7 million Series B (12 million euros) on Tuesday, bringing its total funding to $20 million. Zeotap, whose clients include a number of the top carriers in India, […]
Age is one of digital advertising’s most basic demographic targeting parameters – but most of the age data available across mobile exchanges is unreliable, according to mobile data company Pinsight Media. In a report released Wednesday, Pinsight, a wholly owned independent subsidiary of Sprint, found that 72% of ad requests on exchanges do not include age […]
When it comes to cross-device tracking, privacy policies are not up to snuff – and the Federal Trade Commission is digging in. In a paper penned by the FTC Office of Technology Research and Investigation (OTech for short), it was revealed that the majority of Alexa’s 100 most popular websites have policies that reserve the right […]
After being acquired by Epsilon, Conversant had two big challenges. First, continue combining its own disparate technologies into a single stack. Second, get the whole caboodle working smoothly with Epsilon. Conversant claims it has accomplished the former, as it’s rolled its CRM assets into CORE (Conversant One-to-One Relationship Engine). “CORE takes advantage of our match, […]
This is the latest installment in “PII,” a series featuring the talent that makes the wheels turn in our data-driven advertising world. Read previous interviews with talent from Mindshare, Mediavest | Spark, Razorfish, Essence and INNOCEAN. Digital native Andy Stevens is SVP of research and insights at Clear Channel Outdoor. He works on the Radar initiative, which uses mobile location […]
As the CMO role has evolved, so too has Epsilon’s selling strategy. “We were trying to sell everything to every customer,” said Stacey Hawes, president of Epsilon’s data practice. “We want to step back and ask, ‘Where does methodical selling make sense, rather than being everything to everyone?’” In September, Epsilon reorganized into six practices […]
LiveRamp will drop $140 million to finance its people-based marketing dreams. On Thursday, the Acxiom-owned onboarding company announced its intention to acquire two companies: Arbor, a marketplace for people-based data, and Circulate, which helps app developers monetize their first-party data in a privacy-friendly way. LiveRamp declined to say how much it paid for each company. […]
Agencies across WPP’s network will gain access Spotify’s audience insights for better targeting across creative and media. The multiyear partnership between Spotify and WPP’s Data Alliance, announced Tuesday, will grant WPP access to anonymized and aggregated data from Spotify’s 100 million listeners across 60 countries. “The data we have from Spotify will resonate across WPP,” […]
Drawbridge is letting brands get their hands dirty with cross-device data. On Monday, the cross-device company launched self-serve functionality that lets ad buyers see how their buying choices affect what sort of identity graph they get on the other side. The goal is to give advertisers more control so “they can really see how this […]
Facebook will disable targeting based on ethnicity for credit, housing and employment advertisers. ProPublica first reported the development. The move, announced Friday in a blog post by Erin Egan, Facebook’s VP of US public policy and chief privacy officer, follows criticism from policymakers about the legality of “ethnic affinity marketing,” which Facebook introduced two years […]
Casino gaming and hotel giant Caesars Entertainment is ramping up its people-based marketing efforts, and it’s tapping Acxiom-owned data onboarder LiveRamp for identity resolution. “There are a lot of data partners out there for first-party data, for second-party data, for third-party data,” said Dwight Pirtle, internet marketing manager at Caesars. “But we’re looking to identify […]
Before taking advantage of their first-party data, brands first must figure out what the heck they’ve actually got. “People don’t really appreciate the assets they’ve accumulated over the course of years,” said Acxiom vet Josh Herman, who now leads tech development for CRM, ad tech and analytics platforms at Kimberly-Clark Corp. He spoke at AdExchanger’s […]
Artificial intelligence (AI) is surging in ad/mar tech land. Or resurging, depending on how good your memory is. IBM continues to push Watson, and, in the run-up to their respective conferences, Salesforce and Oracle talked up their own AI initiatives. Also, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon banded together to create best practices around […]
The Weather Co. is no novice at linking weather patterns to consumer actions like in-store purchases, but IBM is giving it some more juice. The Weather Co. rolled out a tool called Journey FX on Thursday. The platform aims to help marketers move beyond one-off media buys to target more predictively against weather attributes and […]
People-based marketing is the natural evolution of data onboarding, according to LiveRamp, the data onboarder owned by Acxiom. On Wednesday, LiveRamp launched IdentityLink, which aims to resolve a single identity across different online and offline touch points. It’s an extension of what LiveRamp already does, said CEO Travis May. LiveRamp’s bread and butter has always been […]
The Marketing Cloud keynote address at Dreamforce included a phrase never before uttered publicly by a Salesforce exec: “You can’t be a marketing cloud without a DMP.” That was SVP and chief product officer Bryan Wade, speaking to around 3,200 Marketing Cloud partners and clients about Salesforce’s intent to acquire Krux. “Think of us as […]
Now that Salesforce has agreed to buy Krux for an estimated $700 million, which standalone data management platforms are left? And is there still a market for independent DMPs, given the trend toward integrated marketing tech stacks and the high cost of maintaining data infrastructure? To answer those questions, it’s important first to define terms, […]
Salesforce has shifted back into gear on ad tech M&A after a three-year quiet period. The company will snap up data management platform Krux in a move that could bring its marketing stack into closer parity with its archrival Oracle. The acquisition’s price tag is $700 million, a number that will put smiles on the faces […]
Business intel and anomaly detection tool Anodot is looking for what doesn’t make sense. “Traditional BI and visualization only gives you answers to the questions you think to ask, but when you’ve got a lot of data, doing that manually becomes almost mission impossible,” said Anodot CEO and co-founder David Drai. The company raised an […]
