Marketers

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Monday that formalized its opposition to the FCC’s proposed set-top box rules. Under the proposed rules, companies such as Google and TiVo who manufacture their own set-top boxes could access content from multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) without having to […]

Many agree there’s a great need for holding companies to integrate their media buying structure “horizontally”: to collaborate rather than compete across groups. Is it possible the obstacle lies not with the agency, but with the client? Executives from Dentsu Aegis, IPG, Havas, Omnicom and WPP took up the question at the Modern Marketing Summit […]

Andy Kauffman, Marriott’s VP of digital marketing, loves running tests. “We’re very comfortable failing as long as we learn from that and iterate going forward,” said Kauffman, who oversees product and digital brand strategy for Marriott.com. “It may be an overused term, but we really do embrace a test-and-learn approach.” There are dozens of multivariate […]

Mobext, the mobile arm of Havas Media Group, is hoping to get away from using pain-in-the-neck manual whitelists and blacklists to manage brand safety and contextual placements. Consequently, it’s been testing the fruits of an integration – revealed Wednesday – between Peer39, the brand safety and online semantic platform Sizmek bought in 2012, and StrikeAd, […]

Peloton’s biggest problem with digital advertising is that it’s difficult to succinctly explain its product in a banner ad. The four-year-old company, which started on Kickstarter but projects $150 million in revenue this year, sells exercise bikes with video screens. It also live-streams classes funded by monthly subscriptions, sells bikes in showrooms and runs an […]

YouTube reaches more 18- to 49-year-olds on mobile alone than any cable network or broadcaster, said Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, during Google’s glitzy Brandcast event Thursday night in New York City. She cited MAGNA Global’s $250 million upfront commitment to Google Preferred as evidence of the shift of brand TV dollars to digital. YouTube […]

After completing his first full quarter as CEO of performance marketing company Criteo, Eric Eichmann seems confident. Criteo had “very strong top-line growth,” Eichmann told AdExchanger ahead of the company’s Q1 earnings call on Wednesday. Revenue was up 41% year-over-year to $162 million at constant currency minus traffic acquisition costs and that performance was consistent across […]

If marketing is the creative visionary of a big brand, procurement is its practical, strict counterpart. Marketing wants to spend big on the big idea, and procurement wants to save as much as possible. The two often can’t see eye to eye – and marketing budgets suffer. At the ANA’s Financial Management Conference in Boca […]

Marketers and CFOs are struggling to speak each other’s languages, and agencies are getting drowned out amidst the noise. When a brand’s marketing and finance teams can’t align on a goal, the agency fails to meet client KPIs. Agency responsibilities are either passed off to new players in the space, like tech firms and management […]

Intuit has hired Mike Zeman, an architect of Netflix’s programmatic trading desk, to help grow its Mint personal finance brand. Zeman will serve as director of marketing and business development for Intuit’s Consumer Ecosystem Group, reporting to SVP Albert Ko. During his three years at Netflix, Zeman led digital marketing during a period of dramatic […]

CNN is signing on with comScore’s syndicated measurement service Xmedia, a competitive offering to Nielsen’s Total Audience measurement. Xmedia is designed to help media companies understand their cross-platform audiences by tracking unduplicated reach across TV, digital, set-top box and mobile properties. CNN now claims to have a total unduplicated audience of 174 million across TV, […]

It’s possible to sync radio ads and digital billboards to reach drivers with cross-channel messaging – but scale, targeting options and measurement are roadblocks to adoption. For one, there’s just not that much inventory available programmatically yet. “It’s nascent,” admitted Mark van de Crommert, CEO of Mediasynced, an Amsterdam-based TV/online syncing company that recently released […]

Aaron Fetters will discuss advancements (and present-day shortcomings) in data, ad delivery and effectiveness on April 14 at PROGRAMMATIC.IO in San Francisco. Advertisers question ad quality and the ability to activate “open” data across platforms in the programmatic space, but what’s being done about it? First, marketers need to rethink the way they’ve traditionally tallied […]

When Heineken moved more of its advertising budget to digital video, it didn’t see results. “Digital never rose to the top [in marketing mix models], in an almost mind-boggling way,” said Ron Amram, VP of media for Heineken USA. But Heineken knew its audience was moving to digital environments, so it didn’t want to leave […]

Among the findings of this week’s programmatic survey from Forrester and the Association of National Advertisers is this alarming nugget: Programmatic adoption could be hindered unless marketers continue to push for transparency – and make progress getting it. “We need to move from awareness and education to policy and action,” said Jim Nail, principal analyst at Forrester, […]

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (the 4A’s) are divided over how to shed light on issues of transparency and agency rebates. The two trade groups – the ANA representing brands and the 4A’s representing agencies – collaborated last spring by forming a working group of about 15 […]

Battle cries and breast beating notwithstanding, the industry doesn’t seem to be doing all that much to tackle bot fraud, which is expected to take a $7.2 billion bite out of ad budgets in 2016. That’s according to research released on Tuesday by the Association of National Advertisers and bot detection firm White Ops. It’s […]

Influencer marketing found its stride in 2015, and some expect this year will bring it a big step closer to becoming a mature marketing channel. Influencer marketing has established itself as a media category, but “it will become even more important if done in an ordered and manageable way,” said Rob Norman, chief digital officer […]

Everyone at CES 2016 has seen it all before. Like last year and the year before, there are flatter televisions, displays bright enough to melt your face and the most aggressive gathering of people to ever combine lanyards and khakis. But even if no new gizmo is combusting the collective mind here in Las Vegas, there is […]

Like many vendors and publishers at CES, AOL is using the conference as an opportunity to update its agencies and brands on what’s going on at the company and to solidify global partnerships. AOL, after all, had a busier year than most of its peers, having been acquired by Verizon while being acquisitive itself – […]

Acxiom has released an addressable TV product, built from a segmentation platform it acquired in early December from the Allant Group. The tool, announced this week at CES, leverages Acxiom’s workflow automation software and its relationships with multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs). It’s not meant to execute on media buys. “We’re on a mission to […]

For the past three years, Ancestry has used content to drive sales, writing and promoting blog posts like “Do You Have Royal Blood?” to encourage people to buy its product. This strategy goes against conventional wisdom, in which banners are typically meant for driving sales and content to drive awareness. “Every piece [of content] we […]

Six out of 10 marketers would reallocate their media spend if digital media owners failed to supply sufficient third-party measurement, according to new findings from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). In an ANA survey of 154 members conducted this summer, 90% of marketer respondents also said they are “not fully confident” that their working […]

Chief marketing officers and chief privacy officers have very different ways of looking at the world. “Are there any marketing folks in the room?” asked security professional Aubrey Turner, addressing roughly 50 privacy pros at an International Association of Privacy Professionals conference in Washington, DC, on Tuesday. No hands went up. “Good – because I’m […]

Creative and tech have an uneasy coexistence. But the advertising world is in the early stages of a new hybrid model, where creative relies on tech for personalization and storytelling. “With programmatic buying and targeting, the contextual opportunities are increased to quantum levels, and we’ll need machines in order to address them,” said Chick Foxgrover, […]

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) is looking into kickbacks following allegations leveled at agencies. Several months after the ANA formed a joint transparency task force with the American Association of Advertising Agencies (the 4As), it revealed Tuesday it has hired two firms, K2 Intelligence and Ebiquity/FirmDecisions, to do more fact-finding around the issue of media transparency. The vetting process included 26 firms, […]

Marketers are known for a near obsession with data – metrics, iteration and ROI – but a string of CMOs at this year’s ANA Masters of Marketing conference avoided the firm ground of data and measurement in favor risk-taking and experiential concerns. “Advertising isn’t dead, but it’s craving courage,” said Arby’s CMO Robert Lynch, pointing to […]

It’s a question every CMO must answer: How much of my first-party data can safely be shared with tech platform partners? For advertisers in categories where Google has a product offering of its own, the question has even more urgency. Consider ADT, whose home security business faces an emerging competitor in Google’s Nest smart thermostat […]

“Marketer’s Note” is a regular column informing marketers about the rapidly evolving, digital marketing technology ecosystem. This week it is written by Laura Koulet, Analyst, AdExchanger Research. Being a product manager taught me that building good product is complicated; one reason is that you have to evaluate not only where the industry is today, but where it will […]

GameSpot readers know what they like – and they know what they don’t like. Owned and operated by CBS Interactive, the video game news and reviews site caters to the mainstream console gamer aged 18 to 40. And they’re an opinionated, assorted bunch. “On the surface level, that might seem like a homogenous audience – simply […]