Event Coverage

Why is programmatic media buying so dang complicated? That question was an ever-present topic at the 2025 ANA Media Conference in Orlando, Florida this week.

For two days, retail media luminaries gathered to discuss how best to expand the category’s effectiveness (and budgets) for brands and advertisers – without, of course, overlooking how the end goal consumer will react.

Arete Research’s Richard Kramer and Rocco Strauss predicted a reckoning in the year ahead for companies that depend on digital ad revenue, which they expect to decline by 5% to as much as 10% in 2023, thanks to “demand destruction.”

What do cats, dogs, BOPIS, contextual advertising, in-housing, open web standards, identity graphs and astrology have in common? All I can say is that we covered a lot of ground during Day Two of AdExchanger’s Programmatic.IO digital event on Wednesday. Read on for your recap. (And here’s what we got up to on Day One.) […]

While industry executives were ogling Alexa-enabled gadgets and 8K roll-up TVs at CES on Tuesday, Martin Sorrell took the stage to talk about the future of the industry and his new holding company, S4. The former WPP CEO, joined on stage by S4’s newly minted board members, MightyHive CEO Pete Kim and MediaMonks CEO Wesley […]

Dmexco is shrinking, becoming less international and is evolving into a vendor showcase. Multiple industry vets told AdExchanger that the sprawling event, considered a must-attend conference along with CES and the Cannes Lions, felt like “sellers talking to sellers.” Many also noted a lack of agency presence. “There seems to be less in the way of […]

The Digital Marketing Exposition & Conference (Dmexco) kicks off Wednesday in Cologne, Germany, the first event since its main organizer parted ways with the conference’s co-founders. That led some marketers to question the future of the conference and if it would remain a “must-attend” among the ranks of CES and Cannes Lions. But it seems […]

  GroupM Chairman Irwin Gotlieb has always had an intuitive eye for technology. He’s been applying it to the CES show floor since the 1970s, when it was called the Comdex computer expo show and disc drives sold for $400,000. Gotlieb began offering his knowledge to clients, vendors and other partners on his legendary floor […]

Despite a year marred by brand safety blunders, measurement errors and targeting missteps, marketers are mending ties with Facebook and Google as they place blame for the industry’s many issues on its ad tech underbelly. “Just 25% of CMOs’ digital media investment reaches target audiences,” said ANA CEO Bob Liodice during his opening remarks at […]

There’s a “simultaneous frustration” on the buy and sell sides to move beyond legacy TV currency standards like C3 ratings, said Linda Yaccarino, chairwoman of advertising sales and client partnerships at NBCU, at the 4As Transformation show in Los Angeles on Tuesday. This upfront season, NBCU is asking buyers to rethink the way they approach […]

  TV buying is becoming more data-driven, even on the linear side. But buyers and sellers are questioning whether audience targeting works on the medium. “’Should TV be bought on an audience basis?’ is still an outstanding question,” Donna Speciale, president of ad sales at Turner, said Wednesday at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview conference in New […]

For ad tech vendors, chances for exit are still slim and getting slimmer, according to a panel of investors at ad:tech New York at the Javits Center on Thursday. Warren Lee, a partner at venture capital firm Canaan Investors, an early investor in DoubleClick and Tremor Video, put it bluntly: Those who want to succeed […]

For a CMO, convincing the CEO or CRO to put more money toward marketing is a tall order. Because it’s difficult for marketing to prove ROI, large organizations often squeeze the budget. That’s changing. When Denise Karkos became CMO of TD Ameritrade, she told her board upfront that she planned to invest in data, analytics […]

Johnson & Johnson saw the writing on the wall when it began marketing in a digital world. The 130-year-old CPG giant was born and raised in what Alison Lewis, CMO of J&J Consumer Brands, called a “right-handed world.” “We were dominated by brick-and-mortar, Mom was the CEO of the household, big players used size and […]

Advertisers don’t have a strong enough grip on the technological ecosystem to make informed buying decisions, agreed leaders of several leading ad organizations at AdExchanger’s Clean Ads IO conference. Panelists from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) got on stage in New […]

The ailing agency-client relationship is so bad that it resembles a married couple who “hasn’t had sex since 1972.” That’s the grim assessment of Debra Giampoli, director of global strategic agency relations at Mondelez. She speaks from experience: Mondelez has sometimes seen its smaller brands neglected by larger agencies that didn’t understand their business needs. […]

If marketing is the creative visionary of a big brand, procurement is its practical, strict counterpart. Marketing wants to spend big on the big idea, and procurement wants to save as much as possible. The two often can’t see eye to eye – and marketing budgets suffer. At the ANA’s Financial Management Conference in Boca […]

When Adam Warburton – head of mobile at British foreign currency exchange company Travelex – came to Barcelona for last year’s Mobile World Congress, his mission was to comb the exhibition halls and find a marketing technology partner. At the time, Warburton had just started at Travelex after a two-and-a-half-year stint as a mobile manager […]

At last month’s Industry Preview 2014 conference, IPG Mediabrands Global CEO Matt Seiler joined Deloitte Digital principle Mark Singer for a discussion about “The Unfolding Strategy and Services Sector.” The panel was moderated by Zach Rodgers, AdExchanger’s managing editor.

John Sculley, the former Apple and Pepsi CEO, joined David Sable, global CEO of agency Y&R, Jessica Gelman, VP of customer marketing and strategy for Kraft Sports Group (which owns the New England Patriots professional football franchise) and others Thursday in New York for a discussion about the way data has changed the marketing “message.” […]

One of the many highlights of last week’s Industry Preview 2014 conference, which highlighted some of the best and brightest thinking in digital marketing technology, was the “Data Management Platforms” panel discussion moderated by AdExchanger’s Director of Research, Joanna O’Connell. See the panel: Participants included: Scott Howe, CEO, Acxiom Omar Tawakol, CEO, BlueKai Bill Demas, […]

More than 300 marketers, agencies, and platform companies gathered at the St. Regis Martin in San Francisco on Monday for AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference.  Below is a selection of comments made by speakers throughout the day, as recorded by AdExchanger’s editorial staff, including Judith Aquino, Kimberly Maul, and David Kaplan.  Andrew Casale, VP Strategy, Casale […]

Salesforce.com added new mobile customer service solutions to its offerings, the company announced this week. Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff spoke about the new focus for the company, and demonstrated the new features, at an event at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York on Tuesday. The company currently offers three cloud-based products: the Marketing Cloud, which […]

In a panel discussion at Tuesday’s AllFacebook Conference, platform providers offered their insights on Facebook’s Open Graph and what marketers should think about when it comes to their social media plans. Facebook describes “Open Graph” on its developer site as helping “people tell stories about their lives with the apps they use. It provides developers […]

The ad tech startup factory is alive and pulsing in Silicon Valley! Yesterday, tech incubation company and fund, Y Combinator, produced its Ad Innovation Conference in Mountain View, California. 19 ad tech startups presented themselves in various stages of development. A few companies kept their presentation off-the-record, but most “opened the kimono” in 4-minute, company […]

If your favorite stars are in the digital advertising technology world (and why wouldn’t they be?), then last week’s Digital Media Summit in New York City was a star-studded affair. Co-produced by LUMA Partners and MediaLink, several hundred attendees came together to hob nob and put their best foot forward to potential acquirers or their […]

The Conversational Marketing Summit continued for a second day at the Hudson Theater in New York City as Internet Week hurtled along. In the late morning, “The Charlie Rose of New Media” – a.k.a. Federated Media‘s John Battelle – proceeded with his long list of interviewees as Google VP of Product Neal Mohan became his […]

Last Thursday, BMO Capital produced their 3rd annual Advertising & Marketing Services Conference which took place at the Grand Hyatt in New York City. An extensive schedule of public and private companies presented their ideas, products and services which included a panel discussion with MediaBank CEO Bill Wise, [x+1] CEO John Nardone, AppNexus CEO Brian […]

In a morning panel at the Gridley & Co. Conference in New York City moderated by Gridley’s Pratik Patel, panelists from the data-driven ecosystem paused just long enough amidst the swirl of funding announcements to provide a few nuggets on the momentum for real-time bidded inventory. Setting the stage for the discussion, real-time ad platform […]