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

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Disney’s Castle … And Walled Garden Disney has often been discussed as a potential buyer of ad tech, but hasn’t shown much interest in the category. It bought a majority stake in the streaming video technology BAMTech in 2017, and ended up taking a […]

At agencies, data-driven talent is rising to the very top. Hearts & Science CEO Scott Hagedorn was named CEO of Omnicom Media Group (OMG) Thursday after 15 years with the company. Hagedorn succeeds Page Thompson, who will retire after 40 years at Omnicom. Omnicom has not yet named a replacement for Hagedorn at Hearts & […]

The Big Story is a breezy podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The IAB’s Annual Leadership summit wrapped this week and increasingly, the show has moved to focus on DTC companies like ThirdLove, the startup underwear brand […]

Hearst Magazines named Mike Smith as its first chief data officer Thursday. When Smith joined Hearst in 2013, he introduced programmatic to its sites and oversaw programmatic buying. As chief data officer, Smith will oversee data use in programmatic campaigns, branded content, direct sold campaigns, sales operations and editorial. “When Troy [Young] became president of […]

Connected TV: Intuit is getting into it. But the financial software company is not giving up on television’s biggest tentpoles. “We’re doing the blocking and tackling of strong reach and awareness building, but we’re mixing it with more experiential and digital,” said Lauren Stafford Webb, Intuit’s VP of brand marketing. A balance between traditional 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 Gary Kibel, a partner in the digital media, technology and privacy practice group at Davis & Gilbert. Sir Francis Bacon is often credited with the phrase, “Knowledge is power.” It is […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.  Today’s column is written by Lindsey Harju, co-founder at Blinc Digital Group. Love is in the air – and not just in the seasonal aisle at Target. The smell of chocolate and roses got me thinking: Which advanced TV […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Too Big A Bite Publishers are raging against Apple’s proposal that it take an outrageous share of revenues from a planned “Netflix for news” subscription product. Under Apple’s plan, a new paid tier of Apple News would allow subscribers to access unlimited content for […]

Criteo brought in $670 million in Q4 2018, beating expectations but still 1% below its revenue from the year before, the French ad tech leader reported Tuesday. Criteo’s earnings for the year were flat at about $2.3 billion. But CFO Benoît Fouilland said the stability is a positive sign, considering Criteo was coming out of […]

IPG is still outperforming its peers in a tough market for agencies. Organic net revenue grew 7.1% YoY to $2.41 billion in Q4 and 5.5% YoY to $8 billion in 2018, IPG reported Wednesday. That’s much better than Publicis, which saw organic growth at just 0.3% for the quarter and 0.1% for the year. IPG […]

“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 Gil Elbaz, CEO at Factual. Many believed that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) would protect consumer privacy, rein in behemoths like Facebook, Google and Amazon and give competitors more […]

Goodway Group, a programmatic service provider for regional agencies and midsize brands, is expanding its focus to the Fortune 500 with the launch of a new performance agency. Parent company Goodway Holdings said Wednesday it will launch Control v. Exposed (CvE), which will work with big brands across biddable media, technology and consulting to solve […]

Data transparency is all the rage in digital advertising, but data companies themselves still exist in a world of black boxes and inscrutable spreadsheets. Highland Math was founded last year to help address the issue, by creating a consortium of data providers that pool their own returns to create a market research data set. The […]

AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. This week on the podcast, Jivox CEO Diaz Nesamoney talks about the state of creative personalization and his company’s journey. Jivox didn’t start life as a dynamic creative optimization (DCO) platform. Its first product was an interactive video overlay format, but when a market failed to […]

Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital acquired the programmatic agency MightyHive last December to marry hands-on-keyboard expertise with dynamic creative expertise from MediaMonks. The acquisition kicked off a formal working relationship between S4 CEO Sorrell and MightyHive CEO Pete Kim – who are bonding over their similar Type A personalities. Sorrell’s reputation for all-hours emails and constant […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Justin Choi, founder and CEO at Nativo. The age of the platform has, without a doubt, taken a serious toll on publishers. Direct content consumption on publisher sites gave way to content discovery via […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. MePodcasts DTC brands love podcast advertising. Take MeUndies, which has sold 9 million pairs of underwear and expects to post $75 million in sales this year after shifting some of its Facebook ad dollars to podcasts four years ago. The brand, which got into […]

Major acquisitions have recently brought both podcast content and distribution under key players like EW Scripps, Spotify, iHeartMedia and Pandora. But advertisers won’t see immediate benefits around better targeting and automated buying. Under this new, consolidated landscape, EW Scripps owns the podcast network Midroll and player app Stitchr, iHeartMedia has Stuff Media, Spotify owns producer […]

Remember when WPP CEO Mark Read said he wanted the holding company to be known for creative transformation? That need to evolve has finally hit Triad, a company WPP acquired in 2016 that sells paid media on ecommerce sites. On Tuesday, Triad rebranded from Triad Retail Media and launched a consultancy to help brands increase […]

“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 Dhawal Mujumdar, co-founder at Polymorph. To combat domain fraud, ads.txt was implemented as a tool for publishers to disclose which exchanges are authorized to sell their inventory. Why don’t we […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. DTC Playbook, Written A values-driven brand with the best X in its category launches on Facebook, quickly gains customers and uses data to improve its products and its marketing process. Ever feel like direct-to-consumer brands are all following the same unwritten set of rules? […]

LiveRamp has added connected TV IDs to IdentityLink, its cross-device identity graph, the company said during its Monday Q4 2018 earnings report. Connected TV IDs are tied to a home IP address, and are used to distinguish households by companies that serve ads over smart TVs or OTT services, including some smart TV manufacturers, multichannel […]

Meredith’s overall Q2 ad revenue grew like gangbusters, but digital ad revenue performance was draggy – and will likely be the same next quarter, the company told investors Monday. Advertising-related revenue nearly doubled year over year to $488.9 million – a 111% increase – and digital represents more than $400 million of Meredith’s revenue for its national media […]

Facebook CFO David Wehner recently told investors that even if the economy falters, Facebook’s ability to measure advertising returns is its saving grace. Will the same hold true for small- to mid-sized marketers? AdExchanger called on several analysts and senior marketers to get their take. On the whole, they agreed SMBs will continue to buy […]

A data orchestration strategy isn’t the sort of thing you can just pull out of a hat – a fact that sports cap and apparel brand Lids knows firsthand. “For a long time, that was one of our biggest challenges as an omnichannel retailer: We had no centralized place for all of our customer information,” said […]

The amount of online media with audience data attached is shrinking, thanks to Apple, which now blocks third-party cookies in Safari, and GDPR, which requires user consent to show personalized ads. But when advertising cookies are missing, marketers have limited, costly alternatives. Some demand-side platforms (DSPs) don’t offer any contextual buying. Or buyers must pay […]

As marketers spend more with Amazon, they’re spawning a cottage industry of Amazon-focused ad tech vendors and service partners. Brands need specialists to guide them across Amazon’s sprawling marketing empire – a brand may deal separately with Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP), Amazon’s Alexa voice group, Amazon Fresh groceries, Twitch and the company’s packaging and shipment […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.  Today’s column is written by Paul Alfieri, chief marketing officer at Cadent. Addressable TV advertising is gaining momentum, with total annual spend projected to exceed $3 billion, according to eMarketer. But like any emerging medium, the noise and hype can […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Listen Up Spotify updated its terms of service late last week to ban ad blockers. “Circumventing or blocking advertisements in the Spotify service, or creating or distributing tools designed to block advertisements in the Spotify service,” can lead to suspension or termination of an […]