“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Rachel Parkin, senior vice president of strategy and sales at CafeMedia. There is a question that has increasingly surfaced in conversations with agencies and demand-side platforms recently, which seems almost retro at first: “What […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. With Friends Like These … Netflix will be there for you – but it won’t come cheap. The streaming service will pay around $100 million to AT&T’s WarnerMedia in order to retain rights to reruns of the TV show “Friends” in 2019, reports The […]
AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Michael Provenzano’s first startup was perfectly timed. Along with his cofounders, he developed one of the industry’s first demand-side platforms, Invite Media, and sold it to Google three years later in one of the most notable deals in the early days of programmatic. His second startup, […]
After weeks of speculation, S4 Capital said Tuesday it will merge with programmatic agency MightyHive. S4, launched by former WPP CEO Martin Sorrell, will pay $150 million for MightyHive. The agency’s revenues grew 129% at a compound annual growth rate between 2015 and 2017. Revenues for the first nine months of 2018 were $40.7 million, […]
When Brooks embarked on an initiative to organize its data last year, it was ready to sprint. But a year into the project, the running shoe brand was still nowhere near the finish line. “It was just going so slowly,” said Mark McKelvey, the company’s VP of information technology. Granted, Brooks had a lot of […]
“Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer’s point of view. Today’s column is written by Belinda J. Smith, global head of media at Electronic Arts. Over the past year or so we’ve seen every indication that in-housing will have as much staying power as “The Year of Mobile” – which enjoyed its […]
Find Your Brand Voice Voice strategies are table stakes for some brands as voice-activated devices proliferate in US homes. Despite little to no advertising opportunities on voice platforms yet, marketers are establishing their presence in the new media environment, The New York Times reports. Some brands are betting big now on voice SEO to ensure […]
Over a year before the FBI brought down 3ve’s human creators, the ad industry rolled out ads.txt, an anti-domain spoofing standard that slowly throttled the botnet. 3ve visited spoofed domains and sold fake traffic to publishers and, when it was active, was responsible for 1% to 2% of all bid requests, according to Google product […]
Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital said Monday it is in advanced talks to acquire programmatic marketing agency MightyHive, five months after it paid $350 million for digital production agency MediaMonks. MightyHive is valued at up to $200 million and brings in $25 million in annual revenue, according to Financial Times. Sorrell launched S4 in April after […]
About seven years ago, DSPs that pitched marketers directly risked losing massive agency contracts. But today, as more marketers influence technology decisions and take programmatic contracts in-house, DSPs are freer to go after brands directly. Even The Trade Desk, which built a $6 billion business by pledging its allegiance to agencies, has signed more than […]
GroupM and Magna both released global advertising spend forecasts Monday with very different findings. GroupM lowered its ad spend growth forecast for this year from 4.5% to 4.3%, reaching $543 billion. Magna, which measured 2018 in retrospect, said global ad spend grew by a record 7.2% this year to $552 billion. GroupM revised its 2019 […]
Shorting Ads Verizon is inching away from the grand advertising ambitions it once had for Oath. The ad unit has a new chief, Guru Gowrappan, following Tim Armstrong’s departure in September, and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg, who took over in August, is more interested in network infrastructure than media. And after failing to meet ad […]
“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Ryan Christiansen, co-founder and CEO at Ntooitive Digital. The ability to track and effectively target consumer actions has never been more essential to marketers seeking to unleash the power of cross-platform digital advertising. With […]
After a protracted, year-long alpha period, the IAB Tech Lab has released the specs in beta for the app version of its Ads.txt initiative to reduce counterfeit ad inventory. The App-ads.txt hold-up was caused by app stores dragging their heels on providing support for the Tech Lab’s preferred solution of using metadata tags – essentially […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Erik Requidan, vice president of programmatic strategy at Intermarkets. In a recent podcast, Chris Kane explained three ways that buyers navigate the complex programmatic supply landscape. The hardest: direct-to-publisher integrations. Some of the biggest names in media […]
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. Sell Me A Story YouTube is expanding its Stories feature to all creators with over 10,000 followers. YouTube Stories launched last year as “Reels” and was only available to select creators. Now, in an effort to capture some of the traffic that its creators […]
AT&T’s ad tech unit Xandr has big hopes for TV advertising, but the company said Thursday during an analyst call that it’s also going to be heavily involved in powering online ads. “You will continue to see Xandr media business outpace the television market in 2019,” Xandr CEO Brian Lesser told investors. “And now what […]
Last year, Comcast Technology Solutions, a division of Comcast Cable that offers services around video workflow and monetization, zeroed in on the monetization opportunities around OTT. The company stepped up its game even more on Wednesday, when it hired programmatic vet Richard Nunn as VP and GM of ad platform, a business within Comcast Technology […]
LiveRamp, dataxu and Index Exchange launched the first commercial proof of concept for the Advertising ID Consortium on Thursday. The product places LiveRamp’s IdentityLink directly in the bidstream, skipping the cookie syncs typically required for a DSP and SSP to match against LiveRamp in a campaign. Additionally, Bill Simmons, dataxu’s co-founder and CTO, is joining […]
“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 Simon Harris, head of programmatic activation at Dentsu Aegis Network. Header bidding has made it common for a buyer to see the same impression several times, as most publishers now offer […]
Imagine buying Costco-sized bulk items online. That’s the proposition of ecom startup Boxed. But while competitors like Amazon offer thousands of items associated with a single search, Boxed offers just a handful. As a newcomer, Boxed’s challenge is acquiring more customers while keeping customer acquisition costs in check. So Boxed is doing local, geo-targeted marketing. […]
“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Matt Hultgren, vice president of analytics at Marketing Architects. Complicated, expensive, unreliable and frustrating. I have heard CMOs and marketing executives use these adjectives – and a few other unprintable ones – to describe […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Mother Knows Best Amazon has been called out by new parents for not clearly labeling sponsored products in its baby registry. Some couples receive gifts they didn’t register for since brands like Johnson & Johnson and Kimberly-Clark can pay for placement and its sponsored […]
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 Wild West days of ad tech are over. Any new startup that wants to stick around must show it can be a business first, […]
When people learned in 2014 that ad fraud was a $6.3 billion problem, many asked why no one had been arrested for stealing all that money from brands. Four years later, that day has arrived. “Finally, somebody gets arrested for this,” said Neal Richter, chief architect of Rakuten Marketing Platform. The FBI charged eight people […]
Until now, if an ad fraud scam was uncovered, the criminals behind it would usually fade back into the shadows with impunity, and shortly thereafter, they’d be back at it again – the seemingly eternal game of Whac-A-Mole. This time, there’s accountability. Two global botnets, Methbot and 3ve, are no more, and there are real people […]
The waterfall wasn’t working out for WeatherBug. “We had what I call ‘too-many-SDKs syndrome,’” said Olivier Vincent, president and general manager at the GroundTruth-owned weather app, which has 20 million monthly active users. If you had peeked inside WeatherBug’s ad stack last year, you’d have found the code for as many as eight different ad […]
When Gap Inc. launched the men’s activewear label Hill City in September, it marked its first new brand in a decade, and its first-ever foray into digital-first territory. Hill City has some notable differences compared to other DTC companies – like corporate ownership and a running start with distribution in 50 Athleta stores (Gap’s activewear […]
New York Media is putting programmatic front and center. The publication has long serviced programmatic deals yet didn’t tout them in market. But as programmatic becomes the dominant way to transact, New York Media hired Jeremy Fass in July to head its programmatic revenue operation. His mandate? Be proactive about programmatic, not reactive. “Due to […]
