Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Amazon Guides The marketing world is still debating who could be the next contender to the duopoly, but WPP is clearly placing its bets on Amazon. Media agency Mindshare and performance marketing agency Possible are offering clients a shared media and ecommerce solution “across the […]
RTB whiz Neal Richter is the new CTO at Rakuten Marketing, the marketing solutions subsidiary of Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten. Richter, who serves as a technical adviser to a number of ad tech startups, including Metamarkets and nToggle, joins the company after more than seven years with Rubicon Project, most recently as CTO. At Rakuten, […]
Food brands that want their ad creative to appear next to recipes for quick and easy dinners, Japanese food or gluten-free meals can buy inventory via CafeMedia’s private marketplaces that fits into those content categories. CafeMedia created those content categories using IBM Watson’s artificial intelligence (AI). Traditionally, companies use content management systems to categorize 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 Jim Spanfeller, founder and general manager of The Daily Meal Ventures Group, a tronc company. Let me start by saying, no, I don’t think agency media-buying groups will become extinct. […]
Outdoor gear retailer REI is hitting the slopes with personalized local advertising. The brand, working with dynamic creative optimization (DCO) platform Jivox, is running hyperlocal campaigns on social channels informed by weather data, interests and past purchases. In particular, REI has been piloting a new Jivox product that allows brands to add new targeting dimensions […]
Live video is picking up steam, but because it takes extra resources to produce – and monetization is still nascent – it can be a tough tradeoff for premium publishers. Yet, with more consumer platforms, such as Facebook Live, testing new monetization tactics like mid-roll ads in live video, publishers are experimenting more aggressively with […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Hey, Big Spender Comcast beat out Procter & Gamble as the top ad spender in 2016, according to Ad Age’s Leading National Advertisers report. P&G, which has ranked No. 1 on the list 42 out of the rankings’ 62 years, has been on a mission […]
The mobile ad industry is a fragmented mess of ad networks. Singapore-based mobile game publisher IGG (I Got Games), which has about 17 million monthly active users globally and spends multiple millions on performance-based user acquisition (UA) every month, works with 100 different networks at any given time. “It’s labor-intensive,” said Mark Zhang, IGG’s SVP […]
Singular and Apsalar are consolidating, and they’ve got their collective head in the marketing cloud. On Tuesday, the duo announced that they will become one and marry their respective technologies – Singular’s mobile marketing analytics tech and Apsalar’s mobile attribution and DMP offering – to take on the likes of Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce on the mobile […]
As automation takes hold of the advertising industry, media planning and buying agencies are being forced to take a cold, hard look in the mirror. “We’re dealing with a lot of forces of commoditization,” MEC CEO Tim Castree told AdExchanger. Castree is in a delicate spot. Following MEC’s merger with sister GroupM agency, Maxus, he’ll […]
“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 director of media activation at Electronic Arts. As anyone who is hiring media buyers knows, there is a talent shortage in the industry. Brands trying to build in-house teams are often faced […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. From Me To EU The EU is expected to hit Google with a $1 billion-plus fine this week – but the money isn’t even the part that matters. A statement from a Google spokeswoman focuses on the shopper search favoritism raised by EU regulators in this […]
Jet.com has been quietly pitching publishers on changes to its payment structure related to affiliate commissions. The message is clear: Work with Jet and it’s prepared to pay you for the privilege. Affiliate bucks often go to the more established players like Amazon or eBay. But in order to incentivize publishers to send traffic its […]
As agencies struggle to transform under continued fee pressure from clients, executives are reassessing whether descending on the French Riviera for a week of endless rosé and parties on yachts sends the right message about the state of the industry. “If clients are using zero-based budgeting, let’s use it for Cannes,” WPP CEO Sir Martin […]
“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Kevin O’Reilly, chief technology officer at TVSquared. Digital has borne the brunt of recent brand-safety issues. While there’s been a lot of talk about offline taking cues from online to improve ad measurement and […]
The drumbeat of blockchain industry news continues this week with the launch of AdLedger Consortium, a blockchain-enabled online advertising group backed by MadHive, a blockchain ad tech startup, IBM, Integral Ad Science and Tegna’s OTT ad subsidiary Premion. As with other initiatives, like Comcast’s fledgling Blockchain Insights Platform, the AdLedger Consortium is still in the […]
As the marketing chief at a sprawling enterprise software company, SAP CMO Maggie Chan Jones has unique insight into marketer pain points. At the top of the list: fragmentation. “There are thousands of marketing technology providers across different marketing functions,” Jones said. “One of the biggest headaches a marketer has is trying to sell one […]
Removing a bad ad unit can mean that publishers take a big revenue hit. The most intrusive ad units often please advertisers and drive large amounts of revenue. And a heavy ad load brings in more revenue per page view. So how do publishers balance the two? And when do they decide to pull the […]
Agency execs who grumble about marketing chiefs not understanding technology have likely not met SunTrust Bank’s CMO Susan Somersille Johnson. Johnson, who has a B.S. in engineering from Harvard and an MBA from the Wharton School, spent the early ’90s at Apple, where she helped develop the PowerBook product and the pricing strategy for Japan. […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Amazon’s Convergence Amazon plans to charge up to $2.8 million for ad packages surrounding the 10 Thursday night NFL games it will stream live this year, Reuters reports. According to unnamed sources, “Buyers also get to run ads on Amazon.com throughout the football season, which […]
“There are three big issues: technological disruption, zero-based budgeting (ZBB) and activist investors,” WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell told AdExchanger at the Cannes Lions festival. “The first involves continuous experimentation,” he said, and WPP has certainly walked the talk on that front. Under Sorrell’s leadership, the company has invested in tech far more aggressively than […]
“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 Kane, founder at Jounce Media. For years, Apple’s Safari browser has endeavored to prevent advertising technology companies from tracking user web browsing behavior via cookies. And for years, ad tech […]
Adobe is looking to get schooled on AI and data science. While many technology giants foster relationships with academics by offering them lucrative part-time consultancy positions. Adobe is pursuing a different tack: dishing out $50,000 no-strings-attached grants to professors and doctoral students working on projects of joint interest. “What academia provides is more the advanced […]
The best-laid plans of app developers are often belied by the actions of actual users. When Guy Tal, CEO of Bel Media Group, an Israeli app publisher with around 100 gaming, social and utility applications, soft-launched Tinder-like Android dating app WeMeet, he and his team assumed users would be easily attracted to the service because […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Joe Hirsch, CEO at YellowHammer Media Group. The IAB Labs’ “ads.txt” initiative is one of several recently proposed solutions to minimize digital advertising fraud. Participating sellers, including supply-side platforms and publishers, would place a […]
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. Au Revoir, Pre-Roll Accenture Interactive is getting into programmatic video – but not in the pre-roll way. In Cannes on Thursday, the agency division of Accenture launched a new ad unit that will programmatically overlay product placements on streaming video content. That could look like, for […]
Despite the tech company takeover of Cannes, the ad industry’s current infatuation – artificial intelligence – confined its appearances to panels and presentations. But a few AI aspirations (“deployments” is too strong a word in many cases) are worth calling out. Tencent The Chinese maker of the popular WeChat application has a machine learning agenda […]
Microsoft is looking to claim itself a spot beside the top dogs competing on the video and cloud front. It says data is the differentiator. “Unlike other providers who use your data to sell groceries or other services that compete [with your business], your data belongs to you,” Martin Wahl, principal program manager for Microsoft, […]
“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 Kerry Bianchi, CEO at Collective. After an open season on shady ad industry practices, resolving transparency problems has moved to the top of the agenda for many concerned brand clients […]
