Marketers

When AMC created a dedicated data sales team, which it revealed last week, it set the stage for AMC to compete more effectively with networks like NBC and Fox. AMC owns the television channels AMC, WE tv, BBC America, IFC and SundanceTV, and its data sales team, called AMCN Agility, will span that national footprint. Spearheaded […]

During the 2016 US presidential election, news publishers experienced an uptick in engagement. The Trump era has kept that engine going. Politico is no exception, where traffic is up more than 30% year over year. That’s one of the reasons why Politico overhauled its website on Tuesday, showing more stories above the fold and optimizing […]

Oscar Garza, EVP of media activation at Essence, will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO conference on April 10-11 at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco. Brands concerned about brand safety, transparency and media budget control are sweetening to the idea of taking programmatic in-house. But marketers often don’t realize there’s a lot more to programmatic than […]

Ever since AT&T hired GroupM honcho Brian Lesser last August to lead its new advertising and analytics business, he’s been on a hiring spree. And many of the recruits share one thing in common: They’ve earned their programmatic stripes in some capacity. Time will tell how the AT&T Advertising & Analytics division will develop should […]

When the outdoor recreation retailer REI closed its shops for Black Friday, the biggest sales day of the year for many stores, it was testing brand appeal against strong short-term revenue, as well as its out-of-home (OOH) media and data services. REI has grown its OOH media from nothing two to three years ago to […]

The world’s largest consumer product brands are struggling to grow their US businesses. While some of the challenges are macro-economic, like increased transportation costs, the biggest factor is the growth of retail private-label brands, which can’t be acquired or stamped out like startup competitors. Large CPGs are also adjusting to new direct-to-consumer and ad-heavy startup […]

Pixability, a platform that originated as a tool for identifying high-performing YouTube channels, is putting its money where its mouth is. The company will refund advertisers for views that run on YouTube inventory that is not brand-safe or fails to meet an advertiser’s agreed-upon brand safety terms, either through cash or TV-like “make-goods.” Although Pixability […]

Albertsons has unleashed shopper data from its network of 2,300 stores to help CPG advertisers determine whether their digital ad spend drove sales. When the grocery chain, whose numerous brands include Safeway, launched Albertsons Performance Media last week, it joined retailers like Target, Kroger and Walmart, which have each invested in building an audience activation […]

Twitter is a company that always seems on the verge of flight. The potential is there, but the question remains: Will the platform ever be able to fulfill it? Instability in Twitter’s C-suite doesn’t help. On Tuesday, COO Anthony Noto – second in command to Jack Dorsey – became the most recent top Twitter exec to fly […]

Just six weeks into her new role as CMO of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Andrea Zahumensky is hitting the market Sunday with her first big campaign launch for the quick-serve restaurant’s new Smoky Mountain BBQ flavor. Zahumensky, who joined KFC from Procter & Gamble, where she was brand director for baby care products in North America, […]

Procter & Gamble isn’t done trimming its agency and advertising investments, even after a year of deep cuts to media and production budgets, according to senior managers during the company’s Q2 earnings report on Tuesday. Digital media and tech vendors have become more transparent since P&G began crusading against online supply chain failures a year […]

Many large brands have in-housed advertising technology as part of a data-driven marketing overhaul. But for Marriott, the data-driven plan has meant taking more ownership of media production, including travel news sites and documentary features, as data ties creative content to bottom-line results. Last year, Marriott consolidated data from its Marriott and Ritz-Carlton rewards programs […]

Netflix will inevitably need ads, predicted Jo Ann Ross, CBS’ president and chief advertising revenue officer, during a fireside chat at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview on Thursday. “Maybe they’ll offer a lower-cost version of their service [or a different model],” she said, “but if they’re spending that much money [on content], they will look for ways […]

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Our guest this week is Belinda Smith, a senior brand marketer at Electronic Arts who is also the author of many smart AdExchanger columns. Belinda is a font of insights for any marketer thinking about bringing their media buying activities in-house. When she joined EA, […]

  GroupM Chairman Irwin Gotlieb has always had an intuitive eye for technology. He’s been applying it to the CES show floor since the 1970s, when it was called the Comdex computer expo show and disc drives sold for $400,000. Gotlieb began offering his knowledge to clients, vendors and other partners on his legendary floor […]

When a company as large as SAP doubles down on digital, the executive org chart must change. For the last six months, the enterprise software company has had two primary CMOs: one who is responsible for brand and media and another who focuses on demand generation, life cycle marketing and bottom-line revenue. But they work […]

The center of media activity at CES is the C Space in the Aria hotel. Here you will find the private meeting spaces booked by Turner, Spotify, Twitter, Oath, CBS, NBCU and Samsung Ads. As in the past, the C Space showroom floor – ostensibly an ad tech vendor showcase – was pretty barren this […]

WPP is embracing the forces of change – both internally and externally. Internally, CEO Sir Martin Sorrell knows WPP’s clients want simplification, which will lead to more consolidation. “We’ve seen it amongst clients and media,” he told AdExchanger. “We’re quite likely to see a similar set of circumstances in the agency business.” And externally, he’s […]

L’Oreal will expand a media ownership strategy it piloted in Mexico to other Spanish-speaking countries to generate first-party cookies from its customer base. The idea is similar to sponsored content, but instead of working with a brand-name media company on a story package, for the past year L’Oreal has developed fiufiu, a kind of pop-up […]

Brand safety and transparency were top-of-the-agenda items for advertisers in 2017. But if this was the year of faux pas, mea culpas and the start of a move toward better controls, 2018 will be about buckling down. “The billions of ad dollars pulled off platforms in 2017 was a clarion wake-up call,” said Bill Marino, […]

More marketers are moving programmatic strategy in-house, pushing agencies into an executional role, according to a study released by the Association of National Advertisers on Monday. Most marketers approach in-housing in a hybrid fashion, splitting responsibilities between their internal team and an external agency partner. Marketers increasingly are taking responsibility for strategy while agencies serve […]

Since it began delivering makeup product lines in 2015, the London-based beauty startup Wunder2 demonstrates how savvy ecommerce companies can use Facebook targeting and video campaigns to push into retail distribution. Wunder2 follows in the footsteps of Facebook-centric startup brands like the mattress-in-a-box manufacturer Purple, which landed its first retail distribution deal last month, and […]

When ads show up next to questionable content, consumers are far from impressed. Sixty-four percent of adult consumers say a brand’s reputation is at risk if its media appears next to hateful or derogatory content, according to research released Wednesday by Omnicom media agency Hearts & Science, which surveyed roughly 1,500 consumers ages 22-45 across […]

Champagne used to be reserved for special occasions, but Moet Hennessy USA wants consumers to see its luxury products as more of an everyday utility. The company teamed up with its creative agency, Rehab, and Amazon’s voice-activated service, Alexa, to create Bottles and Bubbles, a customized “skill” or application. Once users command Alexa to “open […]

Wine brand Josh Cellars doesn’t have a taste for traditional media. “We made a choice to stay away from broadcast TV and cable, at least for now,” said Renato Reyes, CMO of Josh Cellars’ parent company, Deutsch Family Wine and Spirits, whose portfolio also includes more household names. Deutsch is the US distributor of Yellow […]

Publishers are getting ensnared in the filters used by many advertisers to combat the YouTube brand safety crisis. Earlier this year, many brands found their ads running next to offensive content on the video platform, prompting marketers and their agencies to enlist third-party monitoring. Now publishers as a whole are feeling the effects. The filters […]

Big consumer product brands like L’Oreal have soaked up as much data as possible in recent years as they try to assemble consumer profiles without the direct data enjoyed by ecommerce merchants and retailers. Doing so requires a multifaceted strategy. L’Oreal’s head of data acquisitions and partnerships, Aruna Paramasivam, described her company’s efforts along these […]

The interactive video ad server Innovid has acquired Taykey, a company that uses machine learning to extract contextual information about video, text and images to help inform ad buys. Terms of the deal, announced Thursday, were not disclosed. Innovid, which has 220 employees, will take on half – or about 20 members – of Taykey’s […]

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 […]

For large CPG brands like Conagra that typically generate the most awareness through mass reach, hyperpersonalized video creative hasn’t always been their top consideration. But that is changing. “We’re seeing more personalized creative and ad versioning from CPG brands [that] might not own any data from the consumer up until the actual purchase point, because […]