Average CPMs on the AppNexus platform rose sharply during the second half of 2015, from below 20 cents last summer to $1.60 by early fall, as invalid traffic was rejected under the company’s anti-fraud efforts. Meanwhile, volume fell off a cliff, with impression transactions plummeting more than 90% from December to September. The company released the data Wednesday […]
ComScore has struck a measurement deal with Twitter to enable a tagless integration to its digital audience delivery and analytics system, validated Campaign Essentials (vCE). The integration will take effect in Q2 and will give advertisers access to digital GRPs and reach and frequency metrics. These new reporting features will be available directly within Twitter’s […]
Nielsen is increasing its ownership stake in Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) – its joint venture with shopper marketing company Catalina – from 50% to a majority 63.5%. Nielsen Catalina connects TV viewing and digital ad exposure to in-store buying, which Nielsen claims perfectly aligned with its business strategy. “Helping clients find the right audiences and […]
Best practices and policies to deal with fraud and botnets are emerging, but ad tech companies aren’t sharing them with each other – partially because they don’t want their secrets to slip out to fraudsters, and partially because ad fraud detection is a competitive differentiator. As a result, companies are developing their own policies and […]
Google is upping its defenses against ad fraud to take on three malware families. The offenders include Bedep, plus two previously unknown entities internally code-named Beetal and Changthangi, which are named for goat species. Read the blog post. Google has developed a filter – now available for advertisers using DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) and Google Display […]
Just because an ad is “in-view,” that doesn’t mean it’s effective. On the contrary, time spent is often a better indicator of ad effectiveness than percentage of pixels in-view on a page. That’s according to a new viewability study from Interpublic Group (IPG) and measurement firm Integral Ad Science. The report, “Putting Science Behind The […]
ComScore and Rentrak have completed their merger, cinching a deal aimed at establishing new multiscreen currencies to rival TV ratings incumbent Nielsen. The all-stock deal was originally valued at $732 million based on market prices at the time the deal was announced in September. The merger, which gained shareholder approvals late Friday, represented $767.7 million in final deal value, […]
Why a user deletes an app is just as important as why that person decided to download in the first place. “Uninstalls are a huge issue and we’ve been trying to get an understanding of what’s really happening there,” said Sudarshan Gangrade, VP of marketing, analytics and partnerships at Ola Cabs, India’s answer to Uber. […]
Despite ongoing efforts by the Media Rating Council to close the reconciliation gap between vendors, discrepancies continue to haunt viewable impression counts. And there are some who say the MRC is needlessly adding complexity to the process with its reporting requirements. “There’s a lot of slicing and dicing of the data going on,” said David […]
The ad server Flashtalking added attribution analytics to its platform Tuesday with the acquisition of Encore Media Metrics. The terms of the deal and valuation were not disclosed. “We think there’s a real opportunity in the market by bringing together in a bundle all the options for online advertising programs,” said Flashtalking CEO John Nardone. […]
“The world may have a polling problem,” declared Nate Silver, the former New York Times statistical wunderkind who’s since launched FiveThirtyEight under the ESPN banner, in an article last year. Silver made this claim following the failure of UK polls to predict results of the country’s general election last May. In the US, he noted […]
Malvertising – or malicious online ads that spread code to commit ad fraud or access a user’s data – might not induce the same industry-wide concern of viewability and fraud, but it’s still an issue. An IAB report from November estimated the cost of malvertising attacks to be more than $200 million – And that’s […]
Do Nielsen and alcoholic beverages mix? The two may sound like unlikely companions, but Nielsen has partnered with the creator of a mobile app called OpenBar to roll out a new measurement platform for alcoholic beverage marketing. The platform, Nielsen Bar Moments, will launch in the first quarter of 2016. BARTRENDr, the data analytics company […]
AskMen is firmly in the pro-platform camp among publishers. The men’s website, born during the dot-com boom, now looks to platforms, not SEO, as a way to gain audience and increase recognition. The king of those platforms is Facebook, where video posts earn the publisher millions of views. AskMen, which is owned by Ziff Davis, […]
Digital marketing firm Impact Radius scooped up ClearSaleing, the attribution component of eBay Enterprise, which was spun off from eBay in November. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Impact Radius CEO Per Pettersen told AdExchanger that he targeted ClearSaleing because “[t]hey have some very innovative technological approaches to cross-device and consumer journey tracking.” Pettersen […]
When it comes to mobile ad fraud, everything old is new again. “All the bad stuff we saw happen in web 1.0 in terms of trying to trick users is coming back with mobile,” said Alex Calic, CRO of The Media Trust, a company focused on ad verification and malware detection. That’s certainly the case […]
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 […]
The prospect of a viewable CPM (vCPM) standard for digital media buying had publishers running scared a year ago. Now, many are embracing the pricing model, but transacting this way is not without its hurdles. Publishers not only need to defend the value of their inventory to buyers when 20 to 50% of the ads […]
ComScore is keeping busy. The online measurement firm announced Thursday that it’ll be entering into a strategic global partnership with Spotify, selling its enterprise digital analytics business to Adobe and launching a new “total home” opt-in panel to measure connected devices in the household, including show-level viewing across Netflix, Roku, Apple TV and Chromecast. ComScore’s […]
Want to track across devices? Then you’re going to have to enter the walled gardens of Google and Facebook. But the open ecosystem is working hard – and working together – to catch up. It’s in this spirit that MarketShare launched Monday a “Consortium for Cross-Device Measurement,” which for now includes Drawbridge, Crosswise, Tapad and […]
Analytics on Sina Weibo used to be fairly rudimentary – number of friends, number of followers, basic engagement metrics and the like. “The previous version wasn’t that good,” admitted Bryan Cheng, VP of commercial products and platforms at Weibo, commonly described as a sort of Twitter/Facebook mashup. “The point is to provide more actionable data.” […]
When the head bean-counter at Brand X walks into the CMO’s office and wants proof that TV spending works, the CMO needs a better answer than “My gut tells me it does.” “Ask anyone in charge of a TV budget, and they’ll tell you that they intuitively know it works,” said David Staas, president of […]
The ad tech community has taken its strategies to legacy marketing channels before – billboards, radio, point-of-sale systems and even linear TV. Now add direct mail to the list. PebblePost launched publicly and revealed a $3 million seed round on Tuesday. CEO Lewis Gersh hopes to bring real-time analytics to direct mail campaigns for the […]
The merger of comScore and Rentrak, announced Tuesday, creates a powerful new player providing unified digital and offline measurement. The deal poses a real challenge to Nielsen, which nevertheless is not about to be overthrown as the reining champ of marketing and media measurement. Pending regulatory approval, comScore will begin to combine its digital audience measurement […]
Nielsen’s having a tough week. On Tuesday, comScore and Rentrak, two of Nielsen’s top competitors, announced their intention to merge into a single measurement monolith. And on Thursday, business channel CNBC, a division of NBCUniversal, will officially kick Nielsen to the curb, turning instead to research firm Cogent Reports for its audience measurement. Comcast-owned NBCUniversal […]
There’s apparently power in numbers in the fight against ratings fixture Nielsen. Measurement companies comScore and Rentrak have reached a definitive agreement to merge, the two companies announced Tuesday. (press release) In the stock-for-stock merger, Rentrak is to merge into a wholly owned subsidiary of comScore. ComScore CEO Serge Matta will take the reins as CEO […]
Just about every brand with a TV budget wants the answer to a simple question: How many people took action after seeing my ad on TV? But it’s not the type of question that can be answered by a gross rating point (GRP). To better understand the impact of its TV advertising, Ford and its […]
Beyond knowing whether an ad was viewed and for how long, marketers want to verify viewability percentages against key audience segments, which is the basis of a new alliance between Nielsen and Integral Ad Science (IAS). Although the two companies have partnered since 2012, they have now expanded the scope of their relationship to offer […]
Pirated content and ad fraud are like a nefarious version of peanut butter and jelly – but there’s not lot of awareness in the industry about their connection. “The people who create pirate sites are the same ones who perpetrate clickbot fraud – they’re the ones who spread malware and create the armies of bots that generate […]
In the world of independent, third-party measurement, Symphony Advanced Media (SAM) is David and Nielsen is Goliath. But the San Francisco-based media measurement and research firm is looking to take on incumbents like Nielsen and comScore with Tuesday’s launch of cross-screen measurement tool VideoPulse. A+E, Viacom, NBC and Warner Brothers’ Media Research and Insights are […]
Simon Property Group, the largest shopping mall operator in the world, is taking its biggest step yet into the world of data-driven advertising. On Thursday, the company launched Simon Media Network, its version of a retail media network.
TTD is introducing agentic AI workflow improvements and automated audience building, which are quickly becoming table stakes for programmatic platforms.
In the modern streaming landscape, everything old is new again. At least that’s the case for NBCUniversal, which is trying to bring back bundled distribution deals and appointment viewing.
OpenX CTO Joel Meyer, who was named Prebid’s new chairman, previews the org’s next phase and helping publishers navigate competing agentic protocols.
Alphonso – LG’s ad tech division – finally has a way out of its legal drama with parent company LG Electronics. Actually, it has three potential options.
Much like the ecosystem of life that surrounds a blue whale, a market of AI SaaS vendors is springing up around the biggest AI companies. And AI data startup Micro1 is emblematic of the shifting nature of these early-stage AI vendors.
