BuzzFeed laid off 8% of its domestic workforce, or 100 people, Wednesday as the company diversifies beyond native advertising. Recode first reported the cuts. With 25% of revenue in 2017 coming from programmatic, affiliate links, commerce and non-native ads, many staffers working on the branded content side are being let go. Despite building a nine-figure revenue […]
During a speech Tuesday at think tank R Street Institute, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai justified his plan to scrap net neutrality (“We’re shifting from one-size-fits-all preemptive regulation to targeted enforcement.”) and took a shot at edge providers like Twitter, Google and Facebook. “Let’s not kid ourselves: When it comes to a free and […]
When Al Jazeera pulled its cable channel from the American market a few years ago, it saw one bright spot: social media. While the cable channel failed, Al Jazeera saw promise in AJ+, its social media arm focused on Facebook and YouTube distribution. The brand operates with a more youthful vibe, taking a personal tone that appeals to millennials. The English-language […]
Oracle DMP has always had a comfortably high perch in terms of advertiser recognition and adoption. And make no mistake – it still does. But Salesforce DMP has reached some pretty high branches in the year since the Krux acquisition, according to Advertiser Perceptions’ Q3 Programmatic Intelligence Report, released Wednesday. The findings come from a […]
“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 Dean Vegliante, president at Netmining. Whenever the press talks about programmatic advertising, most of the attention is focused on major holding companies and their trading desks. While holding companies have been […]
L’Oreal doesn’t like the word “programmatic.” “We prefer ‘precision marketing,’” said Lubomira Rochet, L’Oreal’s chief digital officer. Precision, Rochet said, is about something deeper than targeting or frequency capping or the sequencing of messages. While important, those are tactics, not the cornerstones of a strategy. “But precision advertising goes beyond programmatic,” she said. “For us, […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Service Station Maserati tapped Accenture Interactive to be its “experience agency of record,” a term that encompasses brand strategy, content production, campaign management and, yes, programmatic. Specifically, Accenture will help Maserati take programmatic operations in-house, Campaign reports. Universal McCann and Starcom will continue buying […]
The Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend showed how mobile has grown from a retail investment-and-innovation channel to a true pillar of US commerce. On Cyber Monday, mobile commerce crossed a new threshold with $2 billion in sales, according to data from Adobe. Black Friday of 2016 was the first time US shoppers spent more than $1 […]
The ad industry needs to check itself before it wrecks itself. That was the rallying cry Tuesday at NBCUniversal’s swanky State of the Industry Forum, where 150 digital and broadcast advertising luminaries gathered in midtown Manhattan for fancy eggs and frank discussion. “I’ll cut right to the chase: We have a problem,” said Linda Yaccarino, […]
“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 Curt Larson, vice president of product at Sharethrough. The IAB’s OpenRTB 3.0 Draft Framework is currently available for industry comment. Although many OpenRTB releases make more purely technical enhancements, 3.0 […]
When TrustX launched in September, David Kohl was nervous. “One of the fears is that we would find ourselves in a situation where buyers were making demands that were ultimately not panning out to be so good for the sellers or that sellers would put something into the marketplace that wasn’t interesting to buyers,” said […]
The digital media supply chain is about to get a whole lot smaller thanks to Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The privacy legislation, which takes effect in May, dictates that data controllers could be held responsible for data privacy missteps made by their third-party partners. Marketers and publishers are therefore highly incentivized to run […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. China’s -opoly Will China be home to the next advertising and digital media powerhouse to rival Alphabet and Facebook? Tencent has been flexing its muscles in advertising, and if those ambitions come true, it could pose a threat to Alibaba, Facebook and Google in […]
Amazon wants to own a greater chunk of the video supply chain. Its cloud division, Amazon Web Services, released a suite of video tools called AWS Elemental Media Services on Monday, designed to help live and on-demand video content providers manage workflow. It is available only as a managed service for now. “We’re trying to […]
Meredith Corp’s agreement to acquire Time Inc. for $1.85 billion, announced Sunday, will test whether Meredith’s sales org leadership can benefit from Time’s programmatic technology – and vice versa. In terms of ad sales, it’s a tale of two different strategies. Time Inc. struggled in the wake of a chaotic sales reorg that caused ad […]
Affinio, a consumer analytics startup, announced a $9 million Series B round on Monday as the company expands its product into brand advertising. It has raised a total of almost $14 million, and investors include Whitecap Venture Partners and Social Starts. Affinio enhances a marketer’s interest graph by connecting first-party data, social media, a DMP […]
MGM Resorts International’s media, ecommerce and analytics teams used to work in silos. “You’d have one team in analytics sending out reports … and separate product owners doing A/B testing and data management,” said Sylvester Obafunwa, the company’s director of digital analytics. “In the past, a lot of our [tech] integration was also primarily focused […]
“The frozen dessert area is one of the most cutthroat spots in the whole store,” according to Mike Fransz, ProYo’s VP of marketing. ProYo, a challenger brand that sells high-protein ice cream, faces three primary marketing challenges: generating awareness in a crowded market, driving foot traffic to the aisle and standing out from a growing […]
“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 Dobson, CEO at The Exchange Lab. Machine learning is revolutionizing digital advertising, driving efficiency through advanced algorithmic decision-making, and could generate $42 billion in annual ad spend by 2021. To […]
The Paid Story Snap launched a new ad format, Promoted Stories, allowing brands to push stories beyond their follower base to all Snap users in an entire country. The ads are a series of three to 10 auto-advancing videos that tell a long-form story and live on the app’s Stories page. Previously, Stories could only […]
A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…
It looks like China is not the ultimate exit for ad tech. Late Tuesday evening, app marketing platform AppLovin said that company will no longer be acquired by a Chinese private equity firm for $1.42 billion as planned. The deal, now scrapped, was first announced in September 2016. The duo will still do a deal, […]
Sometimes it’s a good thing to put your customers in a box. Boxed, a four-year-old ecommerce startup focused on bulk buying, wanted to make its customer acquisition efforts smarter. Boxed customers buy in bulk for very different reasons. Some are busy working parents, while others are urban millennials without a car. Boxed’s new CMO, Jackson […]
For video service Crunchyroll, finding the right mix of ads and subscriptions is critical for ensuring long-term success in the OTT space. That strategy also includes a range of alternative revenue streams, such as offline events and ecommerce. But before it could effectively monetize, Crunchyroll built a scaled audience by catering exclusively to Japanese anime […]
“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. While ad tech has seen a constant stream of innovation over the last few years, one thing has largely stayed the same: private […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. HyphCycle “I like big bots and I cannot lie.” Or so some vendors imply when they release data that raises marketer fears about digital ad fraud. Demand-side platform Adform is the latest to expose a fraud operation, as covered by The Wall Street Journal, […]
The US Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against AT&T has thrown a wrench into the $108 billion planned merger between the telco and Time Warner. The complaint, filed late Monday, alleged the merger could “hinder [AT&T’s] rivals by forcing them to pay hundreds of millions of dollars more per year for Time Warner’s networks.” The filing […]
“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 Michael Wilhite, senior vice president of data strategy at 84.51°. Measuring the effectiveness of digital advertising depends less on absolute performance and more on the benchmark. Current standards suggest that the […]
The question-and-answer site Quora considers itself a unique hybrid of search and social. Since neither of those platforms open themselves up to programmatic demand, Quora decided it wouldn’t go that route either. Quora’s ads platform officially went live in May with 300 advertisers on board, who could only purchase ads through Quora’s Facebook-like self-serve ad […]
B2B buyers are doing more of their product research online – and that was becoming a problem for security software provider McAfee. “We could grow the business when we had a seat at the table with our install base,” said Lisa Matherly, VP of content marketing at McAfee. “But when potential customers were conducting their research […]
