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Ad exchanges used to be a regular feature of the ad tech landscape. Now? You can hardly find a stand-alone ad exchange because other ad tech players (including SSPs) and ad servers rolled all the exchanges into their service suites. And consolidation is a system in which the best company doesn’t always win, writes Jayson Dubin, CEO of Playwire. Publishers can protect themselves in the midst of disruption by taking a few easy steps.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…  

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Paid Upfront NBCUniversal says this year’s upfronts was its highest-grossing since Comcast acquired the programmer in 2013.  Unsurprisingly, streaming media helped break the record. Of NBCU’s $7 billion in ad commitments, per a release, $1 billion is earmarked for its AVOD service Peacock […]

Last year, Levi’s launched an in-house machine-learning bootcamp to help employees who don’t have a formal data science background learn about AI and develop new digital skills. More than 450 people applied for just 60 spots in the program. Roughly two-thirds of the first class were women, says Katia Walsh, head of AI at Levi’s.

Google has tried – and so far mostly failed – to get its customers on board with major new migrations for its online advertising platform. But Google means business this time, with the migration to the new GA4 analytics solution. You’ve got one year. Also: Tech layoffs are on the rise.

Ad-supported video on demand is growing relentlessly. But fact is, TV audiences still consume live linear content – they just want to be able to watch it on their own terms, said Matt Hill, head of Fire device monetization at Amazon. Live TV made up 21% of the 154 million hours people spent watching content on a Fire TV device in February alone.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Programmatic Grave Robbers Caity Weaver, a New York Times Magazine writer, shined a light on a gross and morbid open web practice – death-related news as an online advertising funnel.  Weaver paid $900 to publish an obituary for her mother in her local paper. […]

Max Joseph, the filmmaker and producer of “Catfish,” an MTV reality show that exposes people who lie about themselves online, is helping Israel-based monetization platform Perion promote its cookieless targeting product, called SORT, with a satirical short film that highlights the perils of data collection on the internet and the great lengths one would have to go to in order to avoid it completely.

Steve Webb, the former global head of Facebook’s Audience Network, has joined Unity Technologies as VP of revenue for ads under its Operate division. Webb’s first day was June 13 and he replaces Julie Shumaker, who was elevated to SVP of revenue for Unity’s Create division in October. (Unity, which went public in September 2020, […]

Two years ago, shortly after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Nike doubled down on what it refers to as its Consumer Direct Acceleration. Nike wasn’t simply weathering a storm, but taking COVID-19’s worldwide shakeup of consumer buying habits as an opportunity to rethink its business “by expanding our digital advantage, reshaping the marketplace of the future and creating deeper, more direct consumer relationships,” CFO Matthew Friend told investors.

Google’s decision to delay third-party cookie deprecation until 2023 came the day before Salon CRO Justin Wohl’s wedding. Salon had converted its ad business to an open-web programmatic model a few years earlier, so the brief reprieve from signal loss came as a huge relief and another reason to pop some champagne. Since then, Wohl has been laying the groundwork for effective post-cookie monetization on the open web.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Personalization Delusion The ability to dynamically scale creative and A/B test dozens – even hundreds – of ad campaign permutations, all potentially targeting specific audience types, has led marketers away from making a single piece of creative that stands alone and appeals to as […]

When it comes to their DEI commitments, are brands more talk or more action? We bring together the buy side and sell side – Publicis President Jason DaWayne Smith and Black Enterprise President and CEO Butch Graves Jr. – for a frank discussion about whether the industry has measured up.

In nature, animals migrate. Elephants, birds, turtles – by some combination of memory, instinct and intuition, creatures in the wild know to make the same epic voyage every year. But how did they make the first great migration? If anyone figures that out, let Google know. It’s struggling to get marketers on board with a major analytics migration set for next year.

The audio advertising market is heating up, and investors are getting in on the action. Audio analytics platform Veritonic announced Tuesday it raised $7.5 million in Series A funding, bringing its total funding to date to $14 million. The company will use the funds to further its audio measurement and attribution capabilities and to grow its engineering and sales staff, said Veritonic founder and CEO Scott Simonelli.

With more eyes on consumer privacy than ever before, data clean rooms have become one of the hottest technologies in marketing when it comes to secure, modern data collection. But as clean rooms come to the forefront, many brands are finding that building and working with this technology requires a little acumen and a lot of planning. St.Clair McLean, VP of infrastructure and security at Alliant, shares three clean room approaches to consider as brands look to align the right capabilities with their needs.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Hypocritic Oath Crisis pregnancy centers, a deceptive moniker for anti-abortion nonprofit groups that target women seeking medical services and/or abortion providers, are sharpening their ad tech chops as they take advantage of new laws targeting abortion providers and the women who seek abortions, […]

Adjust and its parent company AppLovin laid off roughly 12% of their combined staff on Monday. The layoffs come as many tech firms announce hiring freezes, hiring slowdowns and general belt tightening against a backdrop of recession fears, economic uncertainty and public market volatility.

Ad agencies are understaffed and their clients – small businesses in particular – often don’t have the time or the technical background to sift through reams of campaign data. And so, increasingly, they’re turning to automation to cut down on the more tedious and time-consuming aspects of account management. Tag, an independent agency based in Iowa, uses a suite of automated reporting tools, including from Basis Technologies, to communicate cross-platform campaign metrics to its clients.

How should brands think about advertising in the metaverse? The question is a little hard to answer when there’s no consensus about what exactly the metaverse is or what it might become

Pirate’s Booty has long traded on its high level of brand awareness despite not doing much paid advertising at all. Pirate’s Booty only got serious about marketing in 2018, when the brand was acquired by Hershey, and largely skipped over linear TV entirely to reach co-viewing parent and child audiences on connected TV (CTV) and digital channels.

Large format advertising is here to stay. But what if you could link the TV screens in hotels with connected TV (CTV) through programmatic? Much of Marriott’s continued growth will stem from the hotel group’s debut of its very own ad network, writes Humphrey Ho, managing director of Hylink Digital’s Americas business.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Supremely Disturbing Apple and Google (although primarily Apple) have been roiling developers with anti-tracking policies and initiatives, like the AppTrackingTransparency framework on iOS and the Android Privacy Sandbox. But that hasn’t kept them out of the regulatory spotlight. Au contraire. Lawmakers are calling for […]

The grocery chain Albertsons in-housed its advertising services and tech business in February, and is still making big changes to the group. “It’s really about owning the tech stack and the product vision,” said Evan Hovorka, head of retail media products.

PepsiCo’s video game marketing philosophy revolves around gaining a gamer’s trust through three main methods: being authentic, adding value and creating a consistent presence in the gaming community. These priorities have helped PepsiCo integrate its family of brands into highly sought-after video game fandoms, such as Call of Duty and NBA 2K, PepsiCo’s head of esports and gaming Paul Mascali told AdExchanger.

As console gaming evolves, mobile provides a blueprint for solving the challenges around attribution, formatting, targeting and integration in free-to-play (F2P) games. To thrive, subscription-based gaming businesses need other means of monetization, and the F2P model is a viable alternative simply because it opens up many other opportunities for revenue besides in-app purchases.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Shopify Is ‘Just Browsing’ Ads Shopify held its twice-annual road map update event this week. Shopify Editions, as the get-together is called, offered up a handful of tantalizing tidbits for industry observers awaiting news of a consolidated Shopify ad platform.  In May, there […]

If there is one constant in ad tech, it’s change. When the AdExchanger team recorded its first episode four years ago, ad tech was in the middle of one of its acquisition sprees. IPG had just bought Acxiom Marketing Services. Agencies were buying up data platforms as they sought to differentiate and help clients with […]

Although advanced, addressable and convergent TV might sound like synonyms, they are distinct concepts. Think of advanced TV as the umbrella term for anything that is not traditional, over-the-air broadcast TV, with specific techniques including addressable and convergent TV, data-driven linear and OTT. To make the most of TV’s advancements (get it?), it’s important to understand the nuances.