Zeta Global continued its annexation of the demand-side platform (DSP) category on Wednesday, closing a deal with IgnitionOne to take over as its default DSP. The deal also includes the transfer of some employees and accounts, primarily attached to small and mid-size brands. Terms were not disclosed. “It’s an expensive proposition to run a DSP […]
The Washington Post became the latest publisher to develop a self-serve platform to compete with Facebook when it released Zeus Prime on Tuesday. Zeus Prime adds a self-serve buyer interface to Zeus, The Washington Post’s revenue platform. The software-as-a-service platform emphasizes fast ad load times and high viewability. Most recently, it added the cookie-less contextual […]
YouTube is doing its damndest to appeal to TV advertisers. On Tuesday, YouTube made its masthead ad format available within the YouTube TV app through an open beta. Ford was an early beta tester. The unit will be generally available on TV screens sometime in Q4. The masthead format already exists for YouTube on the […]
After Freestar landed atop Inc.’s 2019 list of “Most Successful Companies in America,” co-founder Chris Stark pointed to header bidding as the reason the 45-person company’s growth exploded 36,680% over three years. Freestar solves for the complexity programmatic and header bidding created for publishers. In recent years, publishers managed bids through AdSense, then waterfalls, then […]
When Japan-based SmartNews raised its most recent funding round – $28 million in August – the company’s valuation hit $1.1 billion. It’s an eye-popping appraisal for a news discovery app. There aren’t many ad-supported unicorns galloping around the digital news biz these days. SmartNews has raised just over $116 million since 2013. The app, founded in Tokyo […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Programmatic Everything Tapad co-founders Are Traasdahl and Dag Liodden are the latest ad tech entrepreneurs to bring programmatic principles to adjacent industries. The two have raised $14 million for their new startup Crisp, which will use big data to reduce food waste, VentureBeat reports. […]
Big tech can’t swing a cat these days without hitting an antitrust investigation. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple are all facing varying degrees of heat from the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general across the nation, the House Judiciary Committee and competition authorities around the world. It’s hard to keep track […]
Oracle wants to help marketers bridge the gap between the known and unknown. The company integrated the BlueKai data management platform (DMP) and ID graph with its customer data platform (CDP), it said Tuesday at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. The move is meant to help marketers tie device-level data about unknown prospects […]
Financial Times has started using automation to make selling long-tail inventory more efficient. Automation allows Facebook and Google to capture significant ad revenue from small buyers. But for publishers like the FT, managing those campaigns requires tremendous manpower. Consider that 55% of its global ad campaigns in 2018 had budgets under 10,000 pounds. Salespeople and […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Shiv Gupta, founder at U of Digital. Conventional wisdom nowadays advises marketers to run as far away from black-box ad tech companies as possible. If a sales rep tries to […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Mind The Shop Amazon updated its product search algorithm to give its private-label brands an edge over other relevant or best-selling items, The Wall Street Journal reports. The secret algorithm change was introduced late last year, according to sources who worked on the project. […]
Online video ad spend will total $45 billion this year, up from $37 billion last year, and is expected to exceed $61 billion by 2021, according to Zenith’s Online Video Forecasts 2019 report published on Monday. Video advertising will also set the pace for global advertising, growing at 18% per year compared to 10% for […]
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is nearing its final form. With the close of the state legislature’s 2019 session on Friday, no more bills can be introduced this year, and the handful of amendments that did pass the Senate are now headed to Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk for a signature. Newsom has until […]
Jason Kelly is returning to his old stomping grounds, the flight travel industry, with the launch of an airline revenue management system (RMS) called Kambr, backed by a $4 million funding round. Kelly spent a decade managing online sales and revenue for airlines before getting into advertising technology in 2007 with Rapt, a digital monetization […]
Amazon’s steady growth into a major advertising destination has deepened its interests in influencer marketing. The Amazon Influencer Program launched in 2017 as a way for influencers to earn a rev-share from driving sales on Amazon through links on their social media posts. Amazon gives influencers a vanity URL (amazon.com/shop/influencername) that leads to a personal […]
“Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer’s point of view. Today’s column is written by Sachin Puri, vice president of growth marketing at McAfee. Not a day passes in the marketing world without someone name-dropping machine learning and artificial intelligence in a meeting. The underlying myth is that machine learning is […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Cart, Meet Horse Seth Dallaire, Amazon’s global ad sales leader for the past five years, was named chief revenue officer of Instacart on Friday. Read the release. Instacart’s primary business is with grocers and retailers, who use it for online ordering and delivery. But […]
Usually, you’ve got to pay lawyers for legal advice. But between sessions at Fordham University’s annual conference on international antitrust law and policy in New York City on Friday, there was lots of informal chatter about Google’s growing list of antitrust inquiries. The takeaway: This isn’t Google’s first antitrust rodeo, but it might be different […]
Does this sound familiar? A publisher ad network invests in technology to support more automated, data-driven advertising. Over time, platform revenue supersedes traditional ad sales. Eventually the business pivots hard to tech. It’s a story that played out numerous times in digital advertising over the years, at companies like AOL, Collective and Conversant. Now the […]
“Break up Big Tech” is a good sound bite for presidential candidates on the stump. But antitrust regulators in the United States and around the world aren’t rushing to sharpen their scalpels just yet. While there’s no denying that companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and even Netflix “are extremely strong,” their size in the […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Chris Peterson, managing partner at R2C Group. At the heart of the direct-to-consumer (DTC) revolution is a fundamentally different relationship between brand and customer. That difference is driven by technology. Trillions […]
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. CCPA Crunch Time Lobbyists, cool your jets. The California Consumer Protection Act is nearing its mostly final form. The legislative session closes on Friday the 13th (that’s not ominous), which is also the deadline for lawmakers to pass any outstanding bills. Hail Mary lobbying […]
Are we in the midst of an ad tech resurgence? It’s way too early to say, but public companies like The Trade Desk, Telaria, Cardlytics and Rubicon Project have been outperforming recently. This week on The Big Story, the team looks at what the heck is going on. Certainly business models have matured – no […]
Longtime AppNexus President Michael Rubenstein will leave the business at the end of the year. Rubenstein is the latest top executive at AppNexus to leave since the company was acquired by AT&T under its Xandr unit for $2 billion in June 2018. Founder and CEO Brian O’Kelley left the company in October 2018. Rubenstein joined […]
The data-management platform (DMP) was sold as a tool with the power to turn publisher data into dollars. Vendors wooed publishers into signing multiyear contracts to use the technology. But the expectations didn’t match reality. As those contracts have expired, especially this year, many publishers aren’t renewing them. Just as marketers are moving from the […]
What does physical commodities trading have in common with programmatic advertising? Quite a lot. So it makes sense that ad tech godfather and AppNexus founder Brian O’Kelley is revving up a new startup called CMDTY (pronounced “commodity”) that aims to apply data and technology to the old-school industry of supply chain and logistics management. His […]
NBCUniversal’s Denise Colella will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming PROGRAMMATIC I/O New York conference on Oct. 15 and 16. People watching a TV show shouldn’t see ads they don’t care about. Transforming the TV ad experience to incorporate more targeting is a key mission of Denise Colella, SVP of advanced advertising products and strategy at NBCUniversal. […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. GDPR Who? GDPR hasn’t stunted the growth of programmatic revenue in Europe. An IAB Europe programmatic sales report finds the category grew 33% in 2018 to $18.4 million, The Drum reports. Even excluding the impact of social media ads, programmatic revenue was up 26.6% […]
S4 Capital had a solid second quarter earnings report on Wednesday, with revenue up 41.6% to $108.5 million in the first half of 2019. But that didn’t stop CEO Martin Sorrell from spending a significant portion of the earnings call throwing shade at his competitors, especially his former empire WPP. When asked whether S4 needs […]
